Tour Championship Day 3

Day 3 of the championship was the start of a new tournament. Despite finishing the first two days in second the results were all zeroed and I was anxious to get things rolling.  My plan was to start South of the Hazelton landing and head North if the fish were not there.  The conditions has changed considerably and strong NW winds had the current really moving.

We set up to make our first troll on the same line we ended the day but the fish were not there.  My Humminbird 1197C didn't mark any fish.  Something had changed and I had a hunch the current was moving the fish up shallower so we kept our troll going into much shallower water.  Once we got in the 12-13 feet of water there were fish everywhere.  Sure enough, the increased current moved those fish up shallower.  However, the fish I was marking were small that we finally caught one of those small fish.  I told my co-angler to pull up the rods we were heading North.  If the fish are up shallow, our spot North of Hazelton will be much better.

We arrived at our spot at Eckroth's Corner and set up to troll the same 12-13 foot line at Ecroth's which is much shallower than the boats that were there already were working.  In our first trolling pass our Shad Rap in Orange Hot Tiger caught two fish and they were both nice 22 inchers.  We set up to make our next pass and put 4 of the same baits on.  In the next pass we caught a 20 and a 23 incher.  We went from having a slow day to a great day really fast.

Like most days about 11:30 the bite would get tougher but the fish were still there.  I continued to mark nice walleye on my Humminbird.  So, we kept after those fish.  The bites we were getting were the right ones, it was just a matter of connecting with another good fish.  It wasn't long a we caught a nice 21 incher that went in the box and rounded out our 5 fish limit.  I knew we had a good weight and that my teammate, Tony Renner who was fishing the same area with the same program had a good weight also.

Over the afternoon hours we caught another 8 walleye around 20 inches that were not upgrades for the fish we already had.  It was one hour before we were due to be in that I opted to call it a day.  We had a good weight and I didn't want to show anyone else our program or trolling line so we headed in.

My weight for the day was 16.8 pounds and that was good enough for second.  What I didn't realize that my teammate and travel partner Tony Renner put up a weight over 24 pounds!  That is a HUGE weight and one that seemed to be impossible to overcome but I knew Tony and I were on the right fish and maybe I could get some of those bites the next day.  Needless to say, we were happy being 1 and 2 after day 3.