It’s been such a fun summer of fishing – I can’t believe it’s pretty much over for the year.

After Phil and I fished the Boom Open I had only one tournament left, but still a lot more fishing for the year!

Ryan and Michelle came up to the cottage and spent a few days with Lesa and me. We headed over to Lake Tomahawk to do some drop shotting and some dock fishing. It was a little cool but the fish were still cooperative. We caught our drop shotting fish on Gulp artificials and our dock and weed fish on senkos. It was really a lot of fun. Here are a couple pictures of our catch.

After Ryan and Michelle’s visit I started practice fishing for my last tournament. We thought we were going to fish it on Two Sisters but some of our club members couldn’t get their boat in the lake due to low water so we decided we’d move the lake to Madeline/Carrol Lakes. After several discussions it was finally determined that we would fish the last tournament on Post Lake – a nice sized lake southeast of Rhinelander.

It was a long pull for me – about 50 miles each way – and I hadn’t had time to practice fish it – but I looked at it as an adventure.   Since I couldn’t practice fish it, I used Google Maps to try to find areas that I wanted to fish.

On tournament day I left at 5:00 am to make sure I arrived by 6:30 am.   I found the launch and got my boat in the water – I was ready to go.

At tournament start, I headed up the lake and into a bay that still held some lily pads. My hope was that I could find some fish still hanging around the pads. Nope, zero’ed.

So I started fishing some docks at the edge of the pads and was into a fish right away but lost it.   Next dock down I landed a nice keeper fish. Great! Got the skunk out of the boat. The rest of the docks along that particular shore held no fish. So I moved into a bay and found a little drop off of 3 to 5 feet of water.   And part of that drop off had a little rock point.   I caught 3 or 4 more keeper fish on that little point including a 3 plus pound largemouth. Most of them were on a Texas rigged Sweet Beaver. Now I was one fish short of a limit and I had lost a 2 plus pound smallmouth right at the net. Was sure hoping that I could make that loss up!

I finally was able to catch that last fish to make a limit.   Was glad to be able to go in with 5 fish.

After all the boats got in we had our weigh-in and I’m happy to say I won the tournament with a bag of 11.96 pounds.

This was the last tournament and I ended up 2^nd overall in the club for the season. I missed first place (Mr Bass) by 2 ¼ pounds. While of course I’d of liked to have won the club’s Mr Bass award, I still felt great ending up in 2^nd place for the season.   I guess I’m kind of like the typical Cub fan – “Wait till next year!”

Here’s a picture of my last tournament weigh-in: