Ok...little more indepth report for yesterday for your reading pleasure...

We left my house at 0445 with visions of record stripers going through our heads....got to owls creek before the crowd and backed the boat into the water.

Went to start the engines and ...nothing....batteries are dead.....OK, no problem, I've got a portable jump start kit onboard....hook it up and....again, nothing....

Team meeting.....Otter needs to go get his work truck which has some really long jumper cables, long enough to reach into the boat so we can jump the boat and get the engines in the water really quick.....

Get the truck to Owls creek....back the boat down to the ramp, pull otters truck down the ramp.....get both engines cranked and back the engines down into the water....get r done......it's now about 0600 or so and the tournament boats are starting to show up at the ramp....

Finally get underway and we're going north...figure the big fish will be caught up there so that's where we're going.....get around the jetti at rudee and turn north...immediately get hammered with a good stiff N wind and some good 4 - 6 choppy waves ..head on.....talk about it for a minute and decide that since we only have 6 hours to actually fish, it would make more sense to go ahead and run south and have lines in the water the entire 6 hours than work our a$$ off going north and only get a few hours of lines in....so south we go....

Make it down to the third water tower of corolla, no birds working, a few boats are already there so we scout around for about 10minutes and find the fish....lines in at 0800...we're pulling our white Daisey chain and green daisey chain with mojo's off the short....Chartreuse Umbrealla off the port 2nd line, and a blue stretch off the starboard 2nd line.....Big SIlver Alewife on the center way back line....get nothing for about first hour and the stretch is giving us fits so we pull in the stretch and put on a Red-eye Chesapeake umbrella with 10Oz inline sinker....Bam...first fish on that rig...pull it in and it's a 10.8 pound 32 inch fish (kinda skinney)...ok at least we've got fish in the box....

troll some more and get nothing so we decide to head inshore as the wind has turned to the west so figure the fish may have moved in some....start running over big bait balls....immediately get a fish on each Daisey chain....boat them both ones a 14 pounder, ones a 15.2 pounder....things are looking better...

turn the boat around and get another double, one on the Chartreuse Umbrella and one on the spoon....I grab the spoon and it's a nice fish....Paul works the Umbrella rig in and gets to the boat first...while netting the first fish, I'm getting the Spoon closer to the boat, this fish is shaking his head really hard, I'm thinking ok..this is a money fish....get him a bit closer, another shake of the head and he's gone....not a happy camper right now....

troll through the bait ball again, get another double...both are dinks...ok...getting little later....decide to head out a bit deeper for a shot at a big one.....around 150PM, 10 minutes before lines out get a slamming hit on the Chartreuse umbrella, again, I'm on the rod....fight this fish and he's pulling hard, thinking at least a 30 pound fish for sure.....fight him real easy as don't wanna pull the hook, get him up to the boat and....FOUL HOOK !!!!!, it's about a 16pound fish that was coming in sideways....big bummer......

They called lines out at about that time so we pulled lines and hammered down to try and beat the 50 or so boats that were down there....didn't wanna get caught up in all that boat wake mess....

Turned out to be a beautiful day even though we didn't catch Bubba, very good party afterwards put on by the tournament....I've been told that next year the format will be Biggest 3 fish vice 1 fish as I guess there were alot of compaints with the format...but it really didn't matter to us...it's all about the fishing....If you win a tournament, that's just icing on the cake....

Gotta go take care of the Honey-do list so I can fish another day.......

Bob...Still Think'n

Sounds like you had a great day. Bummer on the battery problem. Thanks for the report.


Dave

Thanks for the read, Bob!! Still sounds like you had a good day even though Bubba didn't answer his invitation!!