Croton Pond Tournament

[fasttrack]

The first Kellogsville Sportspersons Club tournament is in the books. There were 36 boats. Here is the brief story for my partner and me.

Took Friday off to practice. Got on the water at 6am and were surprised to see 48 degree water temps. Started cruising and looking for beds in areas we found them last year but didn't find much. The occasional bed we did find was either empty or just a small buck near it. We did manage a few jerkbait fish here-and-there. My buddy had to leave for a while and go to a funeral visitation in Spring Lake, leaving me to go explore. I found a few smaller largemouth on beds but nothing great. After a while I went back to the launch to eat lunch and chill out for a while before he came back at 2pm. Upon his return, we went back out and checked out some other breaklines, catching a few more decent smallies. Decided to check one last area before calling it a day - glad we did! Caught a couple fish really quick and saw a few more. That's all we needed to know so we left it alone.

Day of tourney: Started on that last practice spot. Jeff caught back to back fish within 10 minutes. We turned around and made another pass and I caught back to back fish. Minutes later we had a limit. Sure is great to be culling less than an hour into the season! We found that the fish backed off a little and were not as agressive as the day before. My partner worked a pearl jerkbait quite slowly while I was dead-sticking a 4" X-worm by Wayne Carpenter (Xtreme Tackle). I think I ended up with a few more fish than my partner, but it was faily even action overall.  We did not see many fish on beds, but heard later than some people did find some bedded fish in other areas - mostly smaller males though. By about 9:30 we had culled through 3 limits of fish but then our action basically stopped. Didn't catch another keeper after that. We ended up placing 3rd with 14.6 lbs. Second place had 15.1 lb and the winning team had 17 lbs.

It was interesting to hear guys at the weigh in talking. Some caught their fish in the last hour or two (ours all came early). Some didn't see a fish on a bed all day, some fished nothing but bedded fish all day. Sure is strange how so many things can be going on within one relatively small body of water! If anyone out there was at this tournament, I would love to hear from you.

Best Fishes,
Marc (a.k.a. fasttrack)