Rend Lake Crappie Masters champions!
Pre fishing was brutal!! Between wind and rain and the tough conditions the first couple days were uneventful! We fished Monday through Thursday before the tournament and caught one good fish late Wednesday in an area we wanted to check out before, but the wind was too bad. Thursday was calm and we were able to further explore that area and had about a mile stretch of timber in 10-16' FOW that we caught 3 1.43s in and those were our best fish after 4 days of pre fishing. WE caught some mid 1.20s here and there but settled on that area after Thursday. It's a fairly small lake with timber in 2 arms and fishes a lot like Fork. It's full of crappie but running across big ones was tough. It was post spawn and the fish were skinny and poor looking compared to 2022 when Crappie Masters was there. The fish ate pretty good pre fishing and day one of the tournament but as expected we had a lot of company in our area and day two we were greeted with slick calm conditions and a tough bite! We ended day one with a .53 lead thanks to 2 kicker fish. A 1.60 and a 1.65 on our scale and 7.31 on our Rapala. We always get a good bump on the CM scale since we have such a light scale but really got a good jump here. I caught our fish pitching 1/8oz gingertruce Slab Syndicate hand ties often time tipped with a minnow on the 11' Jenko Silver Pro series rod and Clay Dropped the X15 with a Jenko Afterburner in Pumpkin Spice if they didn't hit the jig on the pitch when we got in range.
Day 2 was hot and slick, and the bite was tougher for sure! We saw more big fish but couldn't get them to bite. We went to straight minnows on the X15 and still they would just grab the tail and swim off with it. We couldn't get them hooked up very good and lost several fish. We did manage 2 good tournament fish on day 2 and a kicker and had 2 smaller end fish to go with them. We figured if it was tough for us, it was tough for most everyone and it was! However, knowing the bag we had day one and that somebody else could come in with that or better never had us feeling great about it! Day 2 we got exactly what we thought we would have after day 1. We managed 6.74 on the Rapala day 2. We were shooting for 6.80 but fell a little short. Mike Valentine and Matt Beckman threw up 8.40 on day 2 and made us sweat till the scale locked! Glad to finally get a qualifier win! We've been close several times but never could seal the deal till now. Blake and the Crappie Masters crew put on a great show, and I always look forward to the tournaments. We'll be back in Missouri next month for stop number 6 at Truman Lake! Looking forward to it and thanks for ya'll following along and all the great folks that help us out along the way! We couldn't do it without them!
No clue how to post pictures here but if you're around the Rend Lake area you outta go check it out. Fun lake and the people around there are great!
Slew
