Thread: Crappie Masters. View from the bottom up.

Don't know Dustin or Michael. Do they crappie.com at all? I'll forgive them for not coming over and introducing themselves.

I think I also missed Dennis. Hate that he had to leave, but there are some things just more important than catching a fish. Prayers...

BTW Randal, I want to give you our view of the National Championship. We realized by noon of day two that we had made a tactical error by fishing on Lake Lee instead of Washington or Whittington.....and we don't like to lake-hop during a tourney. We had prefished all the tourney lakes at least twice in the past couple of weeks before the start and some of them many more times than that. We knew in our heart of hearts that the tournament should be won on the South end of Washington.....a no brainer. We did not even prefish the North end of Washington.....the South end would be where it's happening. We tried all our standard spots everywhere South of the glass house from both banks up to the middle until the weekend before the tourney with multiple proven Washington techniques and the big girls just wouldn't bite. By the second week in Oct the big gals are biting big in Washington and we knew it was 2-3 weeks early but thought the cooler weather would speed the big bite up some .....but up until then it just wasn't happening. Paradise was a possibility but we nearly got killed everytime we went in there by jumping carp while traveling down the long winding canal getting into the lake. We did catch a few good fish there but negotiating the narrow canal and overhanging bushes in the dark of night and fighting the carp with the possibility of getting all our rods broken just kept us out. The fast drop in the river took Lake Ferguson off the page for us because of the poor bite. Whittington was a possibility but we hadn't really been able to get on any really good fish in there either up until a few days before the tourney. Lake Chicot was off the list because of the drawdown and the fact that the only thing we had caught multiple trips there had been yellow bass and catfish. Lake Lee has always been a "go-to" lake for us when all else fails. We caught tons of fish there for three weeks before the tourney but the size was questionable.....just an occasional good one. All this time we were getting more and more confused and really didn't know any more the day before the tourney than we knew three weeks before!! This ultimately wound up being a matter of doing too much thinking and studying and prefishing........ in this case the prefishing HURT us much more than it helped. It skewed our thinking from what we KNEW should be happening and tricked us into taking a CONSERVATIVE approach to ensure that we would weigh-in seven decent fish each day and not be embarrassed. To win a major tournament you have to take chances and in this one we didn't......we should have taken ourselves on over to our FAVORITE spot on the South end of our FAVORITE lake and slow-trolled our normal 1/16th oz jighead with Bobby Garland Baby Shad and a nibble LIKE WE ALWAYS START OUT DOING ON WASHINGTON! We might not have won it but we would have been within a hundred yards of the guys who did win it using this very same technique! We did wind up in 23rd place out of 154 but we are not as proud of it as we maybe should be because of second guessing ourselves and to our minds just giving it away. Please know that if these were not our local lakes we would feel totally different but it took me two hours to convince David that 23rd place wasn't really that bad and to just be happy with what we got. I always heard that it was hard to win on one's own lake.......Hopefully we learned our lesson this time.