Long Lake Marathon Complete

These last three weekends were spent on my favorite lake in the area, Long Lake. It started with a club tournament followed by a TBF event and then wrapped up yesterday after the Spokane Bass Club Long Lake Classic. Over the course of the three weeks I caught several four and five pound smallmouth, cashed one check and also got humbled pretty bad with one small fish at the club tournament. Now that the events are over I will share my bait selection and what I was doing during the events and prefishing. 

The first of the three events was our regular club tournament and unfortunately I did not get to practice for the event because of other tournaments. That's my excuse for this one but really I missed the boat on the jerkbait and crankbait bite until it was too late. Many of the places I went to ended up producing very well the next two weekends, but it was just too early. Needless to say, I finished with one fish for 1.06lbs on my "home lake" and was way down towards the bottom in the standings. If you were wondering, my one fish came dropshotting a Roboworm.

I was able to practice the Friday before the TBF event and literally caught them everywhere I went on a Megabass Vision 110 FX in the perch color. I would catch one and leave and ended up with a few 4lb+ fish on the jerkbait and also caught a few cranking. My wife Tanya caught a 5lb largemouth on a DUO Realis M65 crankbait in a bluegill pattern.

Day 1 of the event was pretty good and I was able to catch two nice fish on a Rapala DT6, both were 4lbs or better, but I could only catch small keepers to go with them and was 5th after the first day with 12.56lbs. Day 2 was pretty bad and lost fish were what really doomed me. I hate being "that guy" who talks about losing big ones, but it really happened to me...twice. Both came off on crankbaits and I ended up with three small ones for 5.5lbs or so and dropped to 14th...ouch!

Day 1 of TBF

The Long Lake Classic was really the biggest one and it had the most money on the line so we really had to step it up.  I fished with my team partner Wes for this one and we had finished 5th last year in this event so we had a good gameplan and knew where to go. We started out the first day with a limit pretty quickly on a DT6 and a tube, including one that was 4lbs+. Then we struggled until later in the day when we were able to cull out four of those fish with bigger ones by dropshotting. Wes lost a huge smallmouth right next to the boat and it about crushed us, but we still ended up with 14.81lbs and were tied for 9th.

Day 1 of Long Lake Classic

On Day 2, we started off slow and finally caught three in a ten minute window on a rockpile, one on a crank and two dropshotting a Roboworm. One of these was a 5lb+ smallmouth. We really struggled again until the last hour when Wes caught a 5lb largemouth, I caught a two pound smallmouth and then he caught a 4lb smallmouth. It really turned our day around and we weighed in 17.87 and moved up to 4th.

Day 2 of Long Lake Classic

So that concludes my three in a row on Long Lake and it is now on to the next few lakes, reservoirs and rivers that will make up my next month of tournament fishing.