Practice: Mike McCarthy Jr.  And I was fortunate enough to be able to get in a day and a half of practice for this event before the cut-off. In practice we were able to locate a couple of areas that had fish. Our goal was to try and find a couple of spots not too far from each other to rotate.  Knowing that the fishing would be tough no matter what, we tried to put together a pattern.  Not too long into our fishing we found an underwater pipe that gave up 9 keepers for about 14 to 15 lbs.  We were wacking fish around this stretch of bank left and right so we left the spot to do some more looking. We fished a lot of different areas and ran as far as we could go trying to sample lay downs, lily pads, the barges, and rip rap.  We didn’t want to look for spots too far away from the pipe.  After much searching we couldn’t find anything like the concentration around that pipe.  We ended up picking off one here and there but one thing was for sure the bass were in the current breaks where you had a certain flow of current.  We’d both caught a bunch of keepers and I caught one over 4lbs. After practice our game plan was to fish the pipe first thing out the gate and then run our pattern to fill out the limit if we couldn’t get it done on just the pipe alone.   We were worried that one of the Stren pros might find our spot and then we would just have to rely on our pattern that we knew was going to be a tedious affair.

 
Tournament: The morning of the tournament was very cool it was only about 50 degrees out and there was a frost on our car’s windshield in the morning.  We had problems with our boaters trolling motor in the parking lot before we even got it wet. The trolling motor switch wasn’t working. We were lucky our Stren boat handler was also an electrician and he was able to get it fixed before our number was called. We were boat number 30 and when it was time we ran up to the pipe to find one of the top ten Stren pros already fishing it.  This was a heartbreak to see.   We couldn’t fish that area and about 100 yards around him because he was claiming it as his water.  We are not supposed to interfere with the Stren pro’s so we had to go to our other areas.  This Stren pro camped out on that pipe the entire day. Every time we passed him he was sitting on it.  There is no doubt in my mind we could have won if we could have fished it. We hit our other areas though flipping our crawls and Mike was able to boat the first keeper off a long main river point that was breaking current. We never caught a fish off this point in practice but we believed in its potential. We pressed on for a couple of hours and we were trying to figure out if we were going to make a big move down river to an area where we’d caught a fish but we decided to stay  and pull up on some main lake lay downs that fit our pattern. We were targeting lay downs just off the main current break.  Mike was able to catch keeper number two and three flipping a crawl as we made our way down the stretch of lay downs.  We were fishing our butts off and the pressure that the fish had experienced from the Stren guys as well as the fluctuations in weather was evident.   We were very fortunate to be getting keeper bites when we finally got bit.  Since you can only weigh 3 fish per an angler it was my turn to move up to the front of the boat and try and add to our weight.  With about an hour to go I was able to add one more keeper to the mix.  I caught the fish flipping a black crawl to an isolated lay down.  We hit our areas again but I wasn’t able to get another bite. The fishing went kind of how we thought it would. We knew that if we couldn’t fish our main spot we would be scratching for a bite here and there.  I’m happy with how we executed on the water with what we were given.  It is always great to have a backup plan if someone is going to find your main spot and get to it before you do.   During the course of the tournament most of our fishing was done with 20lb Gamma High Performance Co-Polymer line on a 7 foot medium heavy AiRRUS Co-Matrix rod. The 7 foot rods were crucial because the fish are so fast that you got to have a long rod and a fast reel to catch up to them once they start to run towards deeper water. We also threw lighter wire worm hooks because the fish up there can be hard to get the hooks in because they bite funny. A 5/0 hook helped out a bunch.  In practice we had some issues hooking our fish so being able to make these adjustments to put everything in the boat was awesome.  Our 4 keepers weighed in at 7lbs4oz which was good enough for 3rd place out of 40 and a nice check...  The tournament qualifies us for the FLW College Fishing regional which is also very nice because that was a huge monkey on our back to qualify.  The regional will be held at Kentucky Lake.  We didn’t want to have to have it come down to Lake of the Ozarks in order to qualify as it is that last chance to do so.  We can now go into the qualifier down at the lake more relaxed and go for the win.