B.A.S.S. Open – Lake Erie – Practice

Posted on February 18, 2010

The first three days I spent in Leamington, Ontario working the Canadian shore of Lake Erie. I also spent a good chunk of one of those days at Pelee Island. I found squat!!! There had been a strong south wind just before I arrived and all of the north shore including Pelee Island was quite muddy. The next day the wind picked back up so I decided to take the day and make the trip around Lake Erie to Sandusky, Ohio, where the tournament was being held. I decided to spend my final day of practice close to Sandusky because there is so much fishable water fairly close and I needed to maximize my time in order to find SOMETHING!!!! I ran out of the bay and started graphing around the Bass Islands. My first spot I actually stopped to fish I caught a ton of fish. Too bad they weren't bass. Just as I was about to pull up the trolling motor I caught a 3 ½ lb largemouth ....in 22ft of water.........WHAT!?!? So fished around a bit more and didn't catch another bass. There was a section just around the corner that I had planned to check so I headed over to see what was up. This was a spot where deep water came right in tight to the bank. In less than 10 minutes of slinging the dropshot around, I landed 4 more largemouth, all solid keepers. The biggest was about 3lbs and the smallest about 2lbs. I didn't really understand why there were so many largemouth out in the main lake and why they were so deep. But maybe I was onto something. This wasn't a winning deal but seemed like it would be pretty easy to catch a limit, something that seemed almost impossible up until this point. I then tried to duplicate this pattern in other areas but it seemed to be more of a general area type of deal. I then tried to find some smallmouth knowing that I would have to in order to have a half decent finish. This never happened for me and I headed back to the hotel to get my gear ready for day one. I knew that I wasn't on much but from talking to some other competitors I knew that the weights would be really low. I knew that it would probably take 20 lbs a day to win. After all it is Erie but I also knew that the weights would fall off pretty quick and that gave me enough confidence to just go out and grind.

Curt Richardson
www.CurtRichardson.com

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