Normandy 5-17-14

Fished the MTCC tournament today with Jerry Hill, aka Lynn's brother. Jerry had fished the day before and called me and said the fish were hitting shallow on brush. He had caught some nice ones up to 14 inch. So we set out at 6 am going up river to his spot were he caught them the day before. Was a little slow. Weather was 48 rising to 54, cloudy with rain, sometimes heavy. Water temp was 69-72. It was a little chilly for middle May. Action was slow but we did manage to catch a few good ones in his spot. They were in the brush about 5-8 ft down. We caught about 30 but only had 4 keepers that weighed in at 3lb something. Big fish was 1.6. Had a couple more that were to close to call but mainly small fish. There were some really good fish and some 7 fish limits brought to weigh in. Check out MTCC to see results. Some of our best fishing came in the last 15 minutes of fishing in a down pour. Caught about 10 with 1 keeper closer to the ramp. Had a lot of fun. Had not been out since Easter weekend so I needed that . :) Was just good to get out and catch a few with good friend. The fish we caught were spawned out but I am not sure about some that were brought to weigh in. Some had big bellies on them still. Will have to ask John about that as he took them to the cutting board. All fish were caught on minnows under slip floats. Did try a bg not sure of the name of it but it was blue with red sparkles in it. Had 3 hits but no hook ups.

Glad you had a good time on what I would have found a tough day. Good to see you at weigh in.

Good to see you to Tim. Will have to get out soon ant try that trolling thing. :)

Good report - enjoyed reading it.

Dave glad ya got into some over there. any time on the water is better than at the office :biggrin

"The Fish"
Well you mentioned asking about the other fish that went home with John. This time, I kept mine and Joeys and John gave me the ones he had from Saturday and just decided to give them to me since I was going to be cleaning mine. As far as the fish, I was shocked as I seen large egg sacks in most all those bigger fish still and non in the smaller fish and surely some of those were females. No males had dark spawning color that I seen Saturday. We was lucky enough to win the tourney, but fish came sort of tough for us. It took us all day to get that 7 fish limit we had. We elected to quit at 1:08 as we were just exhausted fighting the elements and I noticed we wasnt at the dock long at all when about every other team came in too with it raining on down, we were all ready to take it to the house I think. :) We fished many places, many depths and caught fish scattered out through the time doing about every style possible but it did seem the brighter colors worked for us the best, which is sort of odd on a really dreary cloudy rainy day. Usually have better luck on darker colors then, but not this day. Some others I heard did well on dark colors though. Normandy has been a tough lake for a while to me. Definitely not like it was in 09,010,011, or 2012.....2013 there was tough for the most part except for one good trip last December.

Sam and I had to go "old school" to get our mess of fish. We went single pole with dark BG colors for our catch. Fish were in 8' of water and really turned on for us at 10am. We had 2 keepers at that point and then took 20 more keepers in the next 3 hours and they were hitting well. The 1.9 was a nice surprise as all the others were like twins.