Bass Fishing Report - Tournament Fishing - 4/14/13

My friend Dan and myself fished in a bass tournament on Sunday on a southern DE pond that I am a member of.

Getting ready for the start of the tourney

This was my buddy Dan's first tournament and he did great for his first one. We have both fished this pond a lot and thought we had a good gameplan for this time of year. I had Dan start off throwing a brown trout colored #3 Mepps inline spinner through the sparce lily pads while I used a 7" power worm to try to look for bigger fish.

Dan started off on fire nailing one bass after another, and also a decent pickeral which we put in the livewell because there was a largest pickeral category as well. The problem was all the bass were just shy of the 12" minimum accept one which was right at 12".

I started off kind of slow missing a couple bites, but an hour and a half into it I caught two more keepers on 2 consecutive casts with the same 7" purple power worm. Right after that Dan nailed our nicest keeper so far on a red/white #3 Mepps, but this fish was only a little over a pound.

This was a 4 hour tourney and after 2 hours we had 4 keepers, but our biggest fish was just over a pound. We then went about an hour catching nothing put small pickeral and even smaller bass.

I decided to give up the rubber worm and went to a chatter bait and my first cast I nailed another keeper, but again it was just over 12". Right before the end of the tournament we found another group of fish. Dan nailed another decent fish close to a pound to finish off our limit and we caught 3 or 4 more and culled one or two fish, but still nothing huge.

Back at the dock that was the story of the tournment, almost every boat had their limit, but not many big fish. The "lunker" bass was caught by the same guy who won the overall tournament. His lunker was just over 3 pounds, but his stringer was only 8.5 pounds.

Our stringer ended up at just around 5 pounds. Definitely not great for 6 fish, but it was good enough for 5th out of the 12 boats in the tournament.

We decided to go back out and fish for an hour while the other boats were being pulled and wouldn't you know it we caught 2, 2 pound fish in that hour after the tournament was over. That's the way it always goes. It was a lot of fun and we'll be ready for the one next month!