FLW Detroit Recap

FLW Detroit is complete and it was really nice to get back on the water and competing again.  The Detroit River is a nice venue as you know you will be catching fish in many different ways and usually the fish are VERY nice.  This trip was no different although there were a few things that I would have like to see end up a little different, but, I will cover that later.

The prefishing for this tournament was very good.  My first full day on the water was spent trolling on Lake Erie.  I opted to troll crankbaits despite the water sitting at the 52 degree mark.  Fortunately we were able to connect with a lot of nice fish on day one, including the giant pictured here caught by Matt Carlander, my practice partner.  The pattern I found the first day prefishing is the same pattern that I used for the tournament.  The pattern was good, unfortunately the conditions changed some which required some adjustments.

Day two of prefishing was spent jigging the Detroit River and after spending a few hours getting the bite figured out in the extremely clean water I felt very comfortable if we were to be forced to stay in the river.  I felt if I were to just fish the River A weight of 25-30 pounds was possible.  However, the bite on the lake was more consistent and the fish were bigger and 30-37 pounds was what we were looking at out there.

So, by day two of prefishing we pretty much committed to fishing the lake as long as the conditions would allow.  When I say we, I am referring to Mark Courts and Jason Prezurkat, who I will be teaming with for this FLW season. Mark, Jason and I will be fishing all the FLW events and are good friends on and off the water, so a partnership was fitting with all the changes in the walleye world leading up to this year.

The new FLW format only allows for two days of fishing before the "cut".  On day one when I arrived on my spot it appeared the fish were gone.  I was marking very few fish despite catching two fish in my first pass.  The bites were encouraging but the Humminbird looked very empty.  Something had changed and my guess was with the windy conditions the fish moved up in the water column and thus I was not marking many.  So as the day progressed and the bites were few and far between, I made adjustments but never did pull my baits high enough.  Basically the fish were 5 ft under the surface and I did not make the needed adjustments to my program.

On Day two when I arrived at the same spot the graph was once again full of fish and they were right where they were prefishing.  After my first two trolling passes I had 4 in the box and the day continued that way.  We continued to pick up fish all day as long as we could stay on the dirtier water.  My partner Gary Speicher and I had a great time pulling in nice lake Erie walleye including one Giant that weighed close to 11 pounds.

In the end I blew the entire tournament on Day one by only weighing 4 fish.  Despite making a nice comeback on day 2, the damage was done.  The sad thing about this tournament was there were only 55 boats.  With that few boats the FLW only paid down 11 places which was very disappointing to most of the anglers.  The reduced entry fee that I discusses at length last year seems to be doing just what I thought it would do, drive away all the anglers that supported the circuit in the past.  I will continue to fish because I want to support both AIM and the FLW circuits.  But, without a way to increase the payouts and no TV coverage there is very little incentive for anglers right now.  But, enough about that, I have another tournament to get ready for and I am looking forward to heading to the Illinois River.