Hayden Lake Recap - 1st Place

It's been almost a week from my last tournament and I'm finally getting my recap on here. The event was on Hayden Lake in North Idaho and I ended up winning it with a limit weighing 9.72lbs. The lake is full of fish but getting keepers was a problem for the club. Largemouth have to be 16 inches long and Smallmouth have to be 12 inches, getting either was easier said than done. Also complicating things was the fact that you could only have two largemouth. Strategy definitely came into play.

I work five minutes from the lake so I was able to get a few hours of practice in after work three different times, so I felt good about what I should be doing in the tournament. In those three afternoon sessions and one half day another day, I probably caught a total of five keepers in all of that fishing. The good news is they were in three different areas.

Since I only caught keepers in a few spots I planned to just rotate through them all day. That's what I did, I fished them in a little milk run and didn't waste my time anywhere else. I started for largemouth first thing and caught one keeper on a senko. Then I went smallmouth fishing and caught four keepers in about thirty minutes on a drop shot with a Berkley PowerBait Twitchtail Minnow. The bait was wrecking them!

Once I had a limit I went to focus on largemouth and ended up catching two more keepers, one on a popper and one on an Eco Pro Tungsten Heavyweight Flippin jig. I'm loving that jig and am catching them on it flipping docks and lily pads.

It was a tough event but it felt good to win it. Going into it I thought I had no chance doing well and doubted whether or not I could even catch a keeper.