End of the Series

Going in to the last tournament of the year for a specific series you tend to sit back a little bit and take stock of the year up to that point. We have come a long way since the first tournament day in April fishing the Detroit River in a blinding snow storm. Weather has plagued us from the very beginning. Fortunately, everyone has to play by the same set of rules and you have to fish with the hand you are dealt. From snow squalls and wind in April, to sleet, rain, and high winds in May, we fished through it all. Day one of round three was great (which also happened to be the worst fishing day of the series) and day two of that same round gave us three rouge waves over 7 feet with one washing over the back of the boat. When I purchased new Gore Tex gear in April I never would have expected to need it all the time. What can we expect from round four?

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Tournament fishermen come in many different forms. Some guys fish simply because they get paid to do so. For them, they are chasing the highest position possible in order to gain as much coverage for their sponsors as they can get. Others fish for the enjoyment of competition, comradry, and seeing where you stack up against the best fisherman in the world. Sponsorship dollars for us this year were extremely tight. We were just not able to align ourselves with the companies we would be proud to represent. This didn’t stop us from competing but it did limit us on certain aspects that could have potentially put us higher in the standings.

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I’ve been asked by numerous people, (including seasoned pro staff fisherman) what it takes to gain those sponsorship dollars to be able to compete at a higher level. Most people assume that with high finishes will come more opportunities. The truth of the matter is that if you are not a good marketing person, sales person, and ultimately someone that has the ability to write stories, product analysis and reviews, then you really don’t have much to offer a company looking to gain exposure. Fortunately for me, I’ve been blessed with the ability to sit down in front of a computer screen and pound out a story that people will enjoy to read. I am able to convey the sponsor’s message and put it out to more people than a position on the stage will ever reach. Although my sponsorship for this year was low, I am very proud of the ones that I did have and took every opportunity to promote their products. I’ve helped more than one new company get their products out to a wider audience, develop new products, and succeed in an avenue that they otherwise would not have taken. Hopefully I can build on that for next year.

The measure of success for any sponsor is to be able to quantify how effectively their sponsorship or marketing dollars are used. Without some sort of barometer, the sponsor has no idea if their marketing dollars in that specific area are working. For me, the best thing a sponsor can do is issue me business cards with specific order codes and discounts. This way, when someone logs in to their site and buys a product they will know exactly how that person obtained knowledge or information of their products. It doesn’t take long to see that a $1000 sponsorship deal at the beginning of the year turned in to $5000 worth of sales.

While looking back at the season, I noticed a trend that I was following that could possibly be effecting my overall outcome. We were always arriving at the appointed tournament site on Wednesday and then pre-fishing on Thursday and Friday. Although this provided a couple of decent days of fishing, it did not provide enough time to accurately explore areas that might be useful come tournament day. For the last tournament I decided to arrive five days prior to the start. By doing so it would give me ample time to explore several different areas and hopefully paint a picture of where the fish were located and what they were doing. My partner was not available for the first few days so I decided to enlist the help of my daughter for pre-fishing.

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Arriving on Sunday the 7th of August in the town of Sault Ste. Marie Michigan and just a stone’s throw away from Canada, we setup camp, ate some lunch, and stretched our legs from the nearly 5 hour vehicle ride. Having left the humidity of Lower Michigan behind, we applied sun screen and headed to the St. Mary’s river to check out the first spot I had found while doing my map research.

This first spot was located just outside of the main shipping channel and was a spoils area where dredge tailings are dumped to ensure the river channel maintains a certain depth. There are several humps, divots, rock, and gravel formations in this section. We quickly discovered that, although the area was 21 feet deep, the bottom was covered with rice weeds that would quickly foul our bottom bouncer and spinner offerings. After clearing gear repeatedly for the better part of an hour and not getting anything accomplished we made a complete change to pulling all crank baits concentrating at the depths between 10 and 16 feet. We were quickly rewarded with our first fish. Not wanting to push our luck and not knowing the area really well forced us to stop fishing for the evening to allow us proper time to get back to the launch before dark.

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We awoke on Monday to bright blue skies. I didn’t feel we really covered the water very well in that first spot so we decided to head back to the spoils area and try it again. I once again attempted to run the live bait rigs but again had issues with weeds. We decided to run an all crank bait program again.

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In the evening we again returned to the same spot. This time we were successful at running a live bait program. I now feel that I have put in ample time at this location and can consider it for the tournament.

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Kevin arrived on Tuesday with terrible news. A loss of a good friend would force him to miss the tournament. He came up to get a little relaxation and to help me pre-fish. I probably would have done the same thing in his shoes. Just needing to get away for a few days. We left port and headed to Lake George. We covered a span of more than 25 miles looking for areas that hold fish. Although this system is vast, there seemed to be few areas that would hold decent amounts of fish. We found an area on the back side of Sugar Island that dropped off very quickly. We caught several non-target species before Kevin and Abby hooked up with this fish.

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Wednesday had us wanting to explore another location of the river. Munuscong bay is located about 30 nautical miles from the launch site. The best plan for pre-fishing to ensure the most time possible is to trailer your boat to a closer location. We found a location within 2 miles and launched just after 8am. Munuscong bay proved to be holding a ton of fish. The problem was that there was so many weeds floating on top of the water that your gear would be fouled before you had a chance to get it to the fish. We fished one of our target areas for 3 hours and never had a strike.

Using my Lowrance I was able to isolate another area of interest. At the time I didn’t understand why I had not seen it on the map. Later I would find out that my printed maps didn’t go that far down. In fact, we were actually now closer to Cedarville and Detour than we were to the Soo. We fished the channel next to Raber Bay and were quickly rewarded with two fish.

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On the third pass you could actually see a storm cell no more than 3 miles from us. At this time a large vessel came up the channel. I was forced to bump up speed on the trolling motor to 2.7 (way faster than the 1.5 I was trolling). All hell broke loose. When all was said and done we had three fish in the boat. Looking back I assume that two things happened. One, the large freighter pushed the fish out of the channel. Two, because we were running so fast our baits were much higher off the bottom and in line with the fish pushed out from the channel.

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Grandma and papa picked Abby up as they were visiting a good friend of ours in Cedarville. They had plans to visit several sights while we were fishing.

On Thursday, Kevin and I decided to figure out just how far and how long it would take us to make the boat trip to Raber Bay. I had already done the math out and figured it to be just over 30 nautical miles and 36 regular miles. It took us an hour to make the trip and burned around 10 to 12 gallons of fuel. The fish completely shut down. Most guys had issues and experienced zero bites. Returning to the dock, Kevin made the trip back home and I made my way to the captains meeting. I was hoping I didn’t have to fish alone but prepared to do so just in case.

I explained the situation to the tournament director and they allowed me to substitute my dad for Kevin.

I spent the night trying to decide whether to make the long run to Raber Bay or the short 5 mile run to the spoils area. I decided to sleep on it. In the morning, we picked up our boat board and launched at 5:30 am. It was very evident that everyone was going toward Raber Bay. I’m not a sheep, I’m not a cow, and I’m not a wolf. I don’t like to follow the pack. We headed for the spoils area.
We had the area mostly to ourselves. We could catch just about anything we wanted. Just no walleye. By days end we had caught 7 pike, 1 sucker, 1 bass, and 2 catfish. At exactly 1pm, we caught our first walleye. We made two more passes and caught two more walleyes in that area before we had to head to the stage with a day one weight of 4.95lbs. Unfortunately, some of the guys that went to Raber Bay found some serious fish and the top four or five guys were sitting a hair over 17lbs.

That night I decided to set a few goals. Tomorrow I would go out and try and put a limit of fish in the Box. I would attempt to climb more spots on the leaderboard than anyone else and obtain the “Cool Under Pressure” award, and I would try hard to finish in the top 20.

Knowing the fish were in the Spoils area, we decided to head there and grind it out all day long. This time, we made shorter passes and each time a fish was caught it was marked on the GPS. It didn’t take long to see the fish were coming from one particular area. By 12 o’clock we had our 5 fish limit. By 2 pm we had upgraded 3 of those 5 fish. I felt good headed to the scale. We had put a limit in the boat, had some good weight, and I was confident that I would climb the leaderboard.

We weighted a total of 11.13 lbs on day two. There were only a handful of boats that weighted more. We sat atop the leaderboard for a while with the biggest fish before being overtaken late. We started day two in 36th place but had no idea where we would end up. It was a long wait.

In the end, we climbed 12 positions and finished in 24th place. Unfortunately, three teams climbed 13 positions and we were pushed out of the “Cool Under Pressure” award. We did our best and came up just a little short. If we could have put two days together we would have finished in second place.

Although I was a little bit bummed out, there was a silver lining. Kevin and I had amassed enough points to place 13th overall for the year. Not bad for a boat with little to no sponsorship, the smallest boat and motor in the fleet, and this being our rookie year. They WILL see us again!