Yesterday was the South Carolina Crappie Association tournament on Lake Murray. As most know, Lake Murray is my home lake. I always look forward to fishing here, but Murray is probably one of the most challenging lakes in the state. I hadn't been fishing since our tournament 2 weeks ago on Greenwood and after that grind I was hopeful for a much better showing.

I took Friday off from work and my dad joined me for a little practice fishing. We tightlined and jigged from 7 AM - 3 PM and found the fishing to be pretty good. We covered a lot of water and never stayed anywhere very long, but we managed to catch crappie everywhere we went. We kept 17 crappie and a few jumbo perch for the frying pan. We caught some nice fish, but not the caliber we thought we'd need in the tournament. We caught fish from 6-17 FOW on a variety of different color jigs.

Saturday morning we decided that trolling would give us our best chance at catching 7 big fish. We caught most of our fish early and by about 9:30 AM things got really slow for us, but that was OK. We just had one of those days on the water where everything seemed to go our way. Every decision seemed to be the right one and every bait change we made seemed to help us catch another quality fish. The highlight of the morning was about 8:30 AM when a couple rods went back. We each grabbed a rod and we knew we had a couple good uns' hooked up. At first you would have thought we had striper on the other end but it didn't take long before we started feeling that big fish thump. Feeling a big one wallowing behind the boat is hard to mistake LOL By the time it was all said and done we had a 2.78 and a 2.08 flopping in the floor of the boat! The 2.78 was good enough for big fish of the tournament and we were fortunate enough to get the win against some very stiff competition with a 14.39 lb creel of 7 fish. It was just a special day on the water and one that I'll remember for a long long time. There were a lot of good weights yesterday and a lot of very nice fish caught from all over the lake.

With that one behind us, it's time to concentrate on Clarks Hill before our tournament in two weeks. I'm looking forward to fishing over there. The Hill has been good to me in the past and it's probably my favorite body of water to fish behind Murray.

Here's a few pics from the weekend:

A couple good ones from Friday


Top 7 from Saturday


Me and my fishing partner showing them off


My future fishing partner familiarizing herself with some big uns'


And finally, the weigh-in board



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk