Friday, prefishing, I did not do well at all. I caught a few small trout while watching Jeff and Liam tear up the reds and big trout. Liam caught a nice 25 inch trout on a Super Spook, and Jeff caught a 20 inch flounder and a few upperslot reds. Other than the typical heckling by my ruthless fishing partners, I took solace in the fact that I had not yet used up all my good kharma the day before the actual tourney.
Saturday was tourney day. We got out on the water around 5:30 am and officially lauched at 6:00. Fishing for a slam, I caught a 21 inch red and an 18 inch trout on a black and chartruse head skitterwalk before sunrise, so that was a big relief. After putting several more similar sized fish in the boat, I paddled over to another area looking for flounder. Fortunately, I was able to castnet some small minnows and using one on a jighead, catch a 17 inch flatty pretty quickly. With that over, I went back to a topwater plug and finished out the day upgrading my trout to 19 inches, and catching a few more reds with the largest being close to 23 inches. It was a good day of fishing, but I wasn't able to find any real big fish. Suber had a very similar day to me basically matching my slam fish for fish. Liam had a real nice trout and red, but unfortunately wasn't able to grind out a flounder. Upthecreek caught a giant 30 inch red, a flounder, but couldn't find the keeper trout.
At the weigh in, I saw that Popeye had caught a nice trout which was good enough for 4th place in the trout division. Upthecreek won the Redfish division and a Malibu kayak with his red. I was able to grind out 7th place in the slam division and Suber finished 6th in the slam. This was a great showing by the few FCKA guys that drove over for the tourney. Out of 430 anglers, that's a great way to represent!
