About a week ago I hit the water for the first tournament of the season. Although Bass Season was not yet open throughout most of the state, pool 2 of the Mississippi river is open to catch and release fishing year round. That makes for a great way to start the season early. I wasn't able to prepare as much as I would have liked for this tournament and because of that I had set my sights on just catching a few smallmouth. They typically can be found closer to the main channel and are almost always in a bad mood. Since I only caught one small fish in practice I felt a limit would land me in the middle of the pack and not get me too far behind for the rest of the season.
My partner Rick and I headed for a cut off the main channel first thing in the morning but the two boats in front of us swung in there too. Not good since it was one of the few places we had gotten a bite during practice. We moved on to some bluff rock and didn't get a bite. We moved again to a culvert that was dumping lots of water into the river. This is where I had caught a keeper in practice. They weren't there and we moved again. I was basically just going fishing now and we moved into water I had flown past in practice but said we should look at it on race day. Turned out to be a good idea. Although there were lots of boats in there, we managed the majority of our 6 fish there. I missed my first bite that ran straight at me with my hand tied jig in his mouth but did manage a nice plump 17" smallie on a shakey head. Rick caught his 3 large mouths on a Yum black neon tube.

3 fish for 5.73 landed me in 17th out of 28. Not as good as I had hoped but past May tournaments have often been much tougher. All but 3 guys caught some fish. 5 smallmouth for 18.23 won the day and showed how good the fishery can be. That bag was caught just a couple hundred yards from the area Rick and I had caught our fish. There was boats on it most of the day so we never moved over there. In hindsight, I guess we should have. It is amazing how 35 miles of water fished so small. If we fish pool 2 in the future, I will have to work  much harder on finding some out of the way spots.

Sport
www.SportSmithFishing.com