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Battle in Grenada - CM National Champtionship
David and I just returned from CrappieMasters National Championship in Grenada, Mississippi which was held this past weekend. There were 196 boats registered according to Mike Valentine and I think 192 actually fished the tournament. We finished Friday (day one) in 19th place and were feeling pretty good about the next day. On day two of the tournament we caught two good ones early where we had found fish the day before. This was a very hard area to fish because the wind had gotten up during the night and was coming from the wrong direction for us. Was very tuff fishing in two-foot rollers when the bite was basically dead to start with. Ten minutes after the first fish went into the live well she was floating on her side and we started to worry. We caught another good one and the same thing happened to her also. We hung weights on the pelvic fins and that helped but by 10:40 they were both dead. We had already called about pre-weighing them and they would not take them until 11:00 so there went 4.4 lbs of fish right off the start. For the next couple of hours it was hard to focus on fishing while thinking about the fish we had lost and how hard we had worked to catch them. We finally left the rough water and eventually found a couple of more fish across the lake. We finished the tournament at 39th place. The two we lost would have put us at 14th......but that's fishing, LOL! We have never had a problem keeping fish alive in our livewells and the seven we had the day before had been caught at the same depth as these and stayed very lively. Both fish that died had been hooked in the top lip and there was absolutely no trauma involved and we still don't understand what happened. Next major tourney we WILL have a life support system in place with temp controlled and oxygen aerated tank sitting on the back deck! No more live wells for me......especially when so much is riding on keeping them alive. Meatgetter also lost a good 2 lber on the first day and nearly lost a couple on the second day but was able to weigh them early. Like all tourney's this was a tuff one....the locals said they couldn't remember the bite ever being so slow this time of year. Everyone is flat out physically and mentally exhausted. But it was a terrific experience that we enjoyed to the max and wouldn't trade that for anything. We learned a lot from the experience and that is the primary reason to fish tournaments anyway....to be a better fisherman.
BTW, the 2013 Crappie Masters National Champions are Tommy Skarlis and Kyle Steinfeldt with a 14 fish two day total of 27.83 lbs! Only 7 teams out of 192 weighed in 14/14 fish... very tough conditions. They were using Berkley Flicker Shad and planer boards going 1 mph. It was two walleye fisherman from Iowa that took us all to school.
This picture of David shows him holding up one of the fish that died. We wouldn't hold up a live fish because we just didn't want to take a chance of something happening. That fish was 2.4 lbs and a good 16 inches but we didn't think to take a picture for the contest. We also did not want to put a picture of the bait we were using online out of consideration to Meatgetter.....it was his creation. It was a special custom made Minner Critter out of Meatgetter's private stock that we used to catch all but two of the fish we caught. Meatgetter's and ours were the only two boats on the lake with this bait..... David and I liked it so well we started calling it the "Nader Bug" because it worked so well on Grenada. We wanted to thank Meatgetter publicly for providing us with that ammunition to do as well as we did. We don't know if he will start mass production and sell it to the public or not but I didn't want to show it online...... If it were up to me I would just as soon he keep it in private stock in order to preserve the fish population, LOL!!
