Le Homme Dieu Tournament Day

The forecast for the day was to be mostly cloudy in the AM and clearing in the afternoon. I was hoping for the clouds to stay until after the tournament. That way the crankbait bite would hold up and the fish would not move shallow where they can be found more easily by other anglers. My non-boater for the day was Ryan Piersdorf. Ryan is 16 years old and will be fishing against us in n time. It's in his blood as he is related to Elite series pro Derek Remitz and his uncle fishes on the pro side here as well.

We pulled up to the first spot and I had a fish on the first cast that jumped off. Thank goodness it wasn't too big. We went down the weedline with the crankbaits and I had a limit pretty quickly but they needed work. We worked that weedline for quite awhile. I was able to get one fish from there that was around 2 pounds, but the rest were pretty small.

We moved to the next weedline and I was able to upgrade a couple more fish with the crankbait. Still nothing that made me get really excited. We continued to fish the weedlines in that are culling every few fish but not making much progress, but every ounce counts. The sun was starting to get close to coming out and I was starting to get thoughts in my head as to what to do when it comes out. I knew it made sense for the fish to go shallow but I wasn't going to head shallow just to do it. My bite had to quit before I went up there, otherwise I was just wasting time. We continued to catch a bunch of fish and I had upgraded enough to get myself over the 10 pound mark which is about where I knew I could get to. I just needed that 3 pound bite.

At about 1:00 our crankbait bite slowed down and the sun was completely out. I knew in the back of my mind that we needed to go shallow. I decided to make a short run to some shallow areas that I have caught fish in the past at but I was not able to find anything that would make me fish there to long. We fished shallow for about 45 minutes with no success. We then ran to a shallow flat outside of a spawning area that I knew the fish had to get on before they went into the spawning area. We caught quite a few fish on top of that flat and I was able to upgrade one more time. Still no big bites and our time was up.

I weighed in at 10.60 pounds which was good enough for 14th place. The best finish I have ever had on this body of water but still not satisfied. If I could do it over again I would of committed to the shallow bite as quite a few of the top 10 anglers caught their better fish shallow on docks.