Lake Oahe SD

Lets just say Lake Oahe did not turn out as planned, which tends to happen a lot in tournament fishing.  But, before I get into that I should say the the fishing on Lake Oahe is excellent right now!  Not only are there excellent numbers of walleye in the system but the size is impressive also.  The overall size of the fish is the biggest change from previous years I would say.

Prefishing for Lake Oahe was very good to say the least.  We established a good trolling bite as well as a good rigging bite in the days leading up to the tournament.  In addition, we were able to rig up some very nice fish, even on calm days.  Leading up to the tournament my confidence was high that I could pull a good finish in this tournament.

Day one of the tournament started out with 25 MPH winds and to make matters worse, I was in the first flight, which was due in at 3:00 PM.  With winds forecast to decrease over the day, I knew it was going to be tough to compete with those that got to fish until 5:00 PM on day one.  Keeping this in mind, I started out rigging on one of our big fish spots but the fish big fish did not cooperate and it became evident very quick that rigging was not the right choice in that wind.

After waisting a couple hours I elected to troll the trees and realized that I should have been doing this all morning.  In the first trolling pass we put three nice weigh fish in the box but still had room for another large fish over 20 inches.  Despite trolling and rigging the rest of the day I could not get a fish over 23 inches to put in the box so we weighed what we had.

Day two was calmer and I had to long day to fish.  I figured I needed to catch 16-17 pounds on day two to make up ground so I did the math in my head and calculated what I needed to keep.  My first fish of the day trolling was 23 inches and that went in the box.  After 3 hours of trolling I still had kept just one 23 incher despite catching 12 fish fish in the first 4 passes, and 4 over 20 inches.  I needed fish three fish between 18 and 20 inches and another 25 incher for a kicker.  We continued to catch fish all day both trolling and rigging but ended up having to keep a 21 and three 15-16 inchers in the last half hour, despite catching bigger fish all day.  That is the hard part about fishing a slot tournament but everyone has to deal with it.

This tournament was very disappointing for me personally as it is the end of my season and I was hoping for a much better finish.  But on a positive note my Evinrude powered Ranger made it through another year with basically no problems.  My Humminbird's performed flawlessly all year and gave me a true advantage on the water.  I rely a lot on my equipment and it is nice to run all year without any problems.  Now it is time to get ready for the hunting season as cool weather is approaching fast and there will be more Northern Beer promotions coming soon.