FOM Belleville Lake 6-29, 6-30

[fishon1219]

We had the 2nd event of the Michigan east divison of Fishers of Men on belleville lake this past weekend. Here is the report.

6-29 Practise- Mark Clark and I decided to get out and practise the lake a little bit because we haven't been on it since last years FOM tournament and hit the ramp at 7:00am. We started out in the bay between the 2 bridges on the north end because over the years this area starts to get good about now and found that the water was really muddy from the recent storms. We did manage to catch a few largemouth on top water, but nothing to brag about.

Next we went under the denton road bridge and fished around the island and mangaged to get a few decent size keepers on tubes and shakeyhead worms and one monster catfish that put up the best fight of the day.

Our practise plan was to just run around the lake fishing the areas that have produced for us throughout the years and hook fish until we caught a keeper and than move on to the next area.

We ran banks for a while and most of the fish we caught were keepers so it shot the plan of not burning up our tournament fish.

We decided that we have never really explored the river up past the rawsonville road bridge so we decided to give that a shot and did manage several nice largemouth up there flipping the wood along the deeper side of the river.  It was now about 3:30 and we had a plan together for the morning and just hoped that we didnt hurt our chances by hooking so many fish running the banks today.

6-30-07 Tournament morning. We get to the ramp at 6:45 in hopes they would unlock the gates early, but that didnt happen. At 7:10 the gate lady finlly shows up and lets us in. We get all the boats in the water and were blasting off at 7:30. Mark and I went to our first spot past the bridges and were suprised to not see anybody on it because it is a well known community hole on the lake. We procedd to have our limit in the boat by 8:00am but they were all right at 14" and every fish had hook holes in there mouth and some even had 3 holes from being caught before.

We did shake off 2 real nice fish the day before so we were sure they were still around so we fished this area until 8:30 with nothing bigger than what we already had.

We moved a short distance to our next area by the cemetary island and it didnt take long to find the fish again and we managed to cull out all of the fish we caught at our starting spot in about 15 minuets. We did manage to get 2 that were just over 2 lbs and from past history on this lake if you bring in 10lbs this time of year you probably get 2nd place if not win the event so our goal was 10lbs.

We manged to catch several more keepers in this area, but nothing more in the 2lb range so we headed of and went bank running and did manage to get that 2 lb average. We probably caught 40 keepers througout the day, but catching the bigger fish in the 2lb range was tough.

At the end of the day we were hoping our 10lb bag would hold up and knew it would be close figuring that everybody had as good of a day as we did.

Check in was at 3:00pm and we get to the ramp on time and loaded the boat and waited for the scales to open. By the time we went to weigh our fish we were suprised at the leader board to see that 6lbs was leading with most teams already weighed in.
The team of Larry Leonardi and Jeff Cox were in line in front of us and they had a respectable bag of fish and there total weight was 9.52.

Now we were nervous. We did weigh every fish on the x-tools scale and it calculated our weight at 10.1, but I dont really know how accurate the hand held is. We weigh our fish and end up with 10.25 so I guess it is pretty darn close.

In the end there were 3 limits brought in and some guys with 4, others with 3 and a couple of zero's.

Belleville lake is a tough lake to fish if you have never been on it and I have to congratulate Larry and Jeff on there very nice catch for hardly ever being on that lake and there 2nd place finish. Good job guys.

[jcox7]

Thanks Kevin

My story is alot shorter:
Did not prefish
havent fish there since a year ago one day
larry hadnt been there since 1994 or something
lucked into second place

Great job kevin: 40 keepers you must of caught every fish in the lake LOL

[SODY]

Sounds like you guy's had fun, how was the meeting with Al? How many boats? as JC does not have the report up at FOMNTT yet. Julie and I were very close to joining you and will try to visit your next tournament. I just could not financially justify it as I'm fishing the BFL and the TBF this weekend. Good Job Guy's!
Sody

[fishon1219]

Sody,
We did indeed have a great time. We ended up with 12 boats. Bobby eads was our bump master for the tournament and he also delivered the message during the meeting. He is a great guy and an excellent speaker.

We hope to see you too at one of our events it will be nice to meet you.

Good luck this weekend

Kevin