What’s up all my friends here at AAA?  Back once again with another warm water report from Southern Utah.  The weather is getting good and the water is warming up. 

I got a call last week from a friend, who is our local club president, asking if I wanted to fish with him in the next Ultimate Bass Team Tour event the following weekend.  Now this is a little bit of a step up in terms of competition and money for both of us, so I had to run it past my wife before I gamble a good chunk of change on this tournament.  She gave me the go, so I called him back and we were in. 

This circut is in it’s first year and one of the 6 regions just happens to be fished at one of my favorite reserviors, Sand Hollow, near my city of St. George, UT.  So I new we could hang with these guys, who a lot I know already and have fished with at the club level.  But these tourney’s have been averaging about 20-25 boats compared to our local club averaging about 9 boats.  Anyway, I just happened to be on vaction all week, so I was able to prefish Tuesday – Thursday.  I stayed off the lake on Friday and was ready for Saturday’s tournament.

Now because of the regulations on this lake, 6 bass with only one over 12 inches, the tournament has some different rules.  They basically do two weigh-ins.  You launch in order in the morning and fish until 11am for your best 2 fish per team.  Then you weigh in and relaunch and fish until 3pm for your next 2 best fish per team.  The combined weight of your teams 4 fish determines the who wins.

During my prefishing, I found that the best chance of catching a big fish was with a certain spinnerbait slowly rolled on the bottom in deeper water.  The water temps are in the mid 50 range now and the fish are scattered.  Some of the males have moved shallow but are very spooky, so I thought we would hit an area I found a couple weeks earlier when the water was clear that sat in about 13ft of water and catch a couple 2 lb keepers and then go deeper and shoot for some bigger fish.  Well, we got to our spot and started hooking fish with the spinnerbait and crankbaits.  I hook into a nice almost 4lb fish and my parter gets an nice 2lb fish.  That fills out our morning limit.  We continue to upgrade but the other fish come up smaller.  I suggest we leave the spot and save it for later and go deep for bigger fish.  We hit a spot on my gps that I prefished and did good earlier in the week.  After a few casts I hook into the big one with the spinnerbait.  I didn’t realize just how big it was until in surfaced from the depths and shook it’s head.  I just about crapped my pants at that moment, kept the line tight and then she shot back down with some serious force.  Now, the biggest bass I have caught was the 5 1/2 lb fish I hooked last month and it was pretty lathargic from the cold water and didn’t put up that much of a fight.  This fish however was not in that class.  I was using 10lb test on my shimano baitcasting combo and that fish was ripping line from my reel.  I managed to get here back up as my parnter grabbed the net.  At the surface again and as my partner gets the net in the water for the scoop, he misses and she shoots back down for another run.  I had my drag set pretty loose but had to back off of it a little more for fear of her breaking my line.  I have never had a bass muscle me like this on did.  It was so freaking sweet!  Anyway, I got her back up and we got her in the net and in the boat.  We both just stared at each other and I just about lost it.  I wanted to go “Ike” on the whole lake, but held it in.  (Mike “Ike” Iconelli is a B.A.S.S. pro that is know for his screaming and antics on the lake).  We were like giddy little school girls for about an hour after that.  I caught this fish at about 8:30am.  We didn’t know how much it weighed at the time, but we figured at least 6lbs.  So we had two really nice fish in the boat and continued to try to relax and keep fishing until the 11am weigh-ins. 

At the morning weigh-ins.  The team before us had a nice 6lb fish, so I new right there we were not the only team with a big keeper.  I brought our 2 fish in and the big fish weighed 7.01 lbs.  Our total morning weight was 10.84 lbs.  Before the 2nd launch we found out we were in the lead and had the big fish.  So our plan was to go back out and repeat our plan.  It didn’t work.  The bite died.  We hit another spot and I caught a couple more keepers in the 1 lb range and then we kept moving trying to upgrade.  Unfortunately we never were able to get the upgrades we needed in the 2nd half of the day. 

We weighed in 2.81 in the afternoon, for a total combined weight of 13.65.  We knew we were up there, but didn’t know for sure until the awards ceremony.  So out of 22 teams, we finished in 3rd place, just 0.18 lbs away from 2nd place, for $375 and I won the Big Fish trophy with that 7.01 lb fish for $265.  Our total payout was $640.  Not too bad for our first “real” tournament.  A day I’ll never forget, that’s for sure. 

Bobby Didier aka The Real D Insane

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