Percy Priest 4-2-2011

Our Bass club, F3, had a tournament this past Saturday on Percy Priest Lake. We had 5 boats fishing on a chilly, windy day. Really really windy. We blasted off (1 at a time, safely) at about 6:15 am. My partner was new member, David DeJesus. David has been successful as a co angler in several of the tournament trails, winning some and some high finishes.

In the first 15-20 minutes he had 1 tournament keeper and then as we were about to try another place, he yelled, “I’ve gotta a good one”. And it was. After a good fight I netted his fish, a 4.25 smallmouth. It was a gorgeously colored smallie as you can see in the picture. It was the big fish of the day, winning a nice pot. Way to go David.

We moved around a bit getting very few bites. I caught one tournament keeper on a Red Eye Shad in crawfish. I lost one in another spot that would have kept. Regretted losing that one.

We finally hit a flat with a number of small points. It was really rocky with a lot of hangups and again in high wind. I caught a nice 2.5 smallmouth and 2 more keepers all on a crawfish One Knocker. The last one was caught at 9:40. We never caught another and weighed in at 12:30pm. It was a tough day.

Rob won first place with a 5 fish limit of 8+ pounds. I was second with 6.48 pounds.David DeJesus was third and also had big fish.

Good to see all my F-3 friends.

There was a BFL tournament with near 70 boats and they didn’t do much better. The winner had 13 pounds but there were nearly 30 with 0 fish and another 14 with just 1. Had Rob entered he would have been around 7th.