Loch Raven Tournament Report

Practice
I had a chance to fish two times again in practice. When I fish the loch I like to test a few spots which range from shallow to very deep. During my 1st day of practice I started in the back of Pierces fishing everything from the road bed back. I mainly focused on water between 12-25 feet with all of my bites coming in 15 feet of water. I was focusing on throwing a spinnerbait, swimbait in a shad pattern, full size brush hog in green pumpkin, red bug and plum apple as well as a drop shot. The most important thing I find this time of year is the weight you are throwing. I tend to go with larger weights to get the fish to react. After fishing the back of Pierces I moved to the main lake points and eventually ended my day on the long point above Dulaney Valley Bridge. This point was loaded with Pickerel.
On my 2nd day I decided to run the same points I did the prior practice but this time in reverse. I like to do this to see if I can time out when the fish are going to bite based on the conditions. I am always looking for what I call bite windows in the day. Periods of time where I am going to have the best chance to get a bite. I want to make sure I am not running during those times. We had a good start to our day bagging a few good fish up north but the water color did not seem right so we quickly left and when we left we found what would be our starting spot. A massive school of fish outside 9lb point and picnic point all suspending in 50 feet of water and busting bait fish on top. This a hard pattern to run because you need bright skies and no wind. We did not spend a lot of time catching these fish as I wanted to focus on our back up plan which was the grass. We ended out day on the road bed where we found a good mount of fish.

Tournament Day
Watching weather all week leading up to tournament day I knew the suspending fish were going to be there but I hate doing this in a tournament. It can be so hit or miss. Once my partner finally decided to show up we were able to make the launch were we drew 3rd wave. Not knowing exactly where everyone was going to go we decided to wait and see if we were going to get 9lb point or picnic point. At blast off everyone ran left and right and left 9lb to us. This could had been great but we did not catch a single keeper off of the point as we focused mainly on the deep weeds in 20-25 feet. Water color was a little bit off for the swimbait to product properly and I was mostly throwing a plum apple brush hog and 10.5 ol monster worm.
As soon as the sun broke the top of the trees so did the fish out front of picnic point. We quickly ran over there and caught 3 good fish to start the day but at the same time we missed 3 giants that just did not hook up on our top water. I even watched a 4 to 5 pounder jump all the way out of the water fly over my Lucky Craft Sammie and not even touch the bait. As soon as the fish come up they also went down and were not biting. I checked another school I found the week before but wind had blown this section out. After checking a few more spots we choose to run to the road bed in Pierces where we found a ton of fish.
Around 11:00 the wind changed direction and was blowing directly down into Pierces. Therefore I positioned the boat on the back side of the grass bed and quickly caught our limit plus a few more fish. All of the fish we caught on watermelon seed full size brush hogs. ½ oz tungsten with and 5/0 hook, 15 lb fluorocarbon line, 7’1” med heavy rod and 7.3:1 shimano curado. The Minn Kota Ultrex with spot lock kept us in the same place the entire time and really helped us make numerous casts to the exact same location. This product is worth its weight in gold. (shameless plug. We can order these for you at Anglers Express). After a short calm period and not many boats in sight we check the way back of Pierces for a quick second with zero results. So we quickly came back to the road bed. While there we culled out our entire bag of fish more time and upgraded a few nice fish. What really sucked is we had 3 more shots at very large breaking fish but we only converted on 1 of 3 fish. Both missed fish grabbed our swimbaits and we got 5 to 6 turns of the reel but did not hook up. Our hearts were broken.
In the end we had a decent bag with 18.67 pounds but we did not have a kicker fish to push us into that 20+ pound range. What a great day we caught tons of fish and were able to salvage a disastrous amount of lost fish to scratch out a decent day.
Congratulation to all of the winners and my hats off to Loch Raven. 7 20+ pound bags of fish is a very nice showing and a sign of a great fishery.
On to Liberty.