Monday, December 29, 2008

Ultimate panfish league contest



Jack and me fished the ultimate panfish league put on by Matt Johnson Outdoors and Thorne brothers.
It was on Linwood lake, a metro lake that has tons of panfish, the key is to try to find the biggest ones, everywhere in the deep water the sonar would light up with fish. the object is to catch the biggest 5 crappies, sunfish, and perch. we pretty much did not try for perch, since the lake doesnt hold many past the 6 inch cutoff.
We started looking for the crappies, hoping for some mules that would be the money fish! I started using a lindy fatboy jig with the biggest ratso to try and attract the slabs and discourage the small fish from biting. It didnt work perfectly as those tiny crappies were very agressive and had big heads for their size with big mouths, so some time was wasted pulling in lots of dinks to get to the keepers.
We got our 5 keeper crappies, and a couple of sunfish, and I started to focus on the gills, i forgot my maggots in the fridge,but i had some waxworms, and that worked good for the gills, almost too good, got lots of little ones, plus the little crappies and big northerns were likeing the smell of those! I caught my biggest pike of the day on a waxworm, I also got some nice pike on the ratso, wasted alot of time playing them, but it was fun though. I finally got on a hole where I popped three good sunfish. We had our ten keepers. We thought about trying for perch because if you get the trifecta of 15 you get a bonus pound added to your weight.
We decided againts that and when to finding a big 'kicker' mule crappie that would seal the deal. We saw another contestant bag a 13 inch slab near us, and we went to work hole hopping for the big one.I got a good eater sized crappie, and another nice pike, and helped jack ice a 6 pound plus pike, but the big crappie was not in the works for us today. We got our fish together to pick out the best ten and went to the weigh in.
I didn't think we would win because we didn't get any whoppers, but it turned out that the guys who got the big slabs didn't get their 10 fish, so we ended up winning by around 5 oz at 3.6 pounds for 10 panfish.

The UPL Linwood contest results and pics HERE

7 comments:

Basspastor said...

Good Job!!! Shake and Bake strike again.

Kevin Dahlke said...

Great job and you never know until the final scale stops weighing as to who is going to be the winner

Great job guys and another chapter to add to your fishing careers

jg lenhart said...

Hey!

If you call my house tomorrow night you can talk to a bunch of people from the Minnesota visit!

John

Basspastor said...

Are you going to blog about the MGO get together or did you end up not going?

Since they have had that Christmas animation up my computer is to slow at MGO for me to check out any reports from the event.

Basspastor said...

I just went to MGO and saw the pictures. Looks like the fishing wasn't so great. You never seem to do very good on ML in the winter.

Michael Thompson said...

yeah they were set up way too shallow, but it still was a good time, you should have came out!
heading to grand rapids tomorrow, see ya

Basspastor said...

Right into the teeth of a snow storm. Have a good time. I hope getting out isn't impossible.