The dog days of summer came early this year, and greeted the 134 teams fishing the Masters Walleye Circuit on the Lake Winnebago System June 29-30 with a large algae bloom that stretched to all sides of Lake Winnebago! Hot, calm conditions on the lake allowed the algae to go nuts, creating a thick green slime on the surface, which at times was teaming with small flies that covered anglers boats making fishing for extended periods of time nearly intolerable!
Despite these unforeseen circumstances, the Walleyes system wide continued to bite readily, which made for some impressive weights come tournament time! The boats were spread out system wide, with big weights coming from the upper lakes, the weeds on Lake Winnebago, and also the mud flats of the main lake.
The winners averaged nearly 20 pounds each day, which is a 4 pound average! This is not easy to do on the Winnebago System, especially two days back to back! Randy Seidl and Mark Schleis brought in a two day total of 39.69 pounds, which won them $18,300! Second place went to the team of Gordy Schwarz and Brett Wilkens, with a two day total of 38.67 pounds! It took a two day total of 30 pounds to even cash a check in this event!
Unfortunately for Steve and I, our hot prefishing program quickly fell apart as the west wind blew the algae and warm surface water into our area, which caused our fish to scatter off of our spots. To make matters worse, at 11:00 on day one we lost our big motor, which meant we had to use the kicker motor to head back to the weigh in, which took 3 hours! We also decided to take all of our trolling rods out of the boat, which turned out to prevent us from trolling back in, hoping for a big bite!
Luckily my dad allowed us to use his boat on day 2, but at this point we knew our bite was dying, and decided not to beat ourselves up or waste too much gas trying to overcome an 11 pound deficit! We were still able to catch 5 decent fish and then decided to weigh in early.
At the end of it all, we ended up in 77th place, and were just happy to get through this one and start looking forward to the next tournament! It doesn't matter how great of a fisherman you are, at some point the chips won't fall into place as planned!
1 comment:
I Like to brows fishing blogs. I love fishing, Carp fishing. Whenever I have found any blog like this that is on Carp fishing, it is nice to have. However I have been experiencing the fishing since my childhood as my family is doing the same. Thanks again for such a nice post.
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