Whitefish Practice Day 1

I was very much looking forward to this tournament as I have been on the Whitefish chain before and have had some success. I have not ever won here but I know what it takes to win and I was looking forward to finally fishing some fish that were in their summer pattern.

I arrived at the lake Wednesday at about noon and just started driving around looking to see what the weeds were doing as I heard that they were nowhere near where they should be for this time of year. After about 30 minutes of driving around I could already tell that this was the case. I was not able to find any weeds where they normally would be. That pretty much told me that I needed to find a better concentration of weeds and that would be a good start of where I could find some fish. I checked out a main lake area that can hold some smallmouth and had a couple smallmouth follow my bait back to the boat, they were not huge but I knew there were some bigger ones around there. From there I went to check some weedlines nearby that had some scattered weeds on them. I was catching a bunch of fish but nothing too big, which is typically the case on this chain of lakes. I pulled up to an inside turn that typically holds some better fish and had a good bite on a Berkley 4" pro tube on my third cast. I set the hook into what felt like a better fish and barely moved the fish before it came unhooked. I made a few more casts into that area and caught a smaller fish and another one about 2.75 pounds. I had confidence in that spot as I had caught fish there in the past and although it's not usually a spot that will hold a large school of fish it can hold a couple better ones. I fished weedlines and flats the rest of the evening but never caught another good fish. I caught probably 40 fish that afternoon but only a couple that would be worth keeping.