Keep your fish wet... How'd you do

 

We didn't do good at all-found some fish Friday night, but apparently half the field also found em. We played bumper boats till midnight, then we left, found a new scene, and spent the rest of the night whackin dinkers. But we had fun at least.

 

Pretty good night until a trailer blow out heading to weigh in! :-(

 

Played leap frog half the night. Take off should of been at 7:00 5hrs till dark everyone running banks fish didn't have time to come up. But I guess it's part of the game you find enough fish the night before to but you in top 10 easy and 15 rigs are stacked in the spot you want to go or your staged there and they come stage 200 yards away. Ok I'm done venting going to sleep.

 

250 boats what did you expect?

 

Umm. Sounds like ya might need a live well to keep Weight for that shoot. Haha. That's a loooong time to weight.

 

Food and somewhere to sit for the very long drug out weigh in would of been nice. Thought we had it made when we found a nice tracker boat to rest in, but didn't take long for them to kick all our stinky a** off them!:laugh:

 

Who won?

 

4 kids from mo. 60 pound grassie =big fish and 396 stringer

 

Were you one of the 4 kids from Missouri ????? By your avatar pic ????

 

That's one hell of a stringer congrats to those fellas.

 

I figured that it was going to be like that just stating sucks when your setting good and it falls apart. Guess I should of had a backup plan oh wait I did but the fish didn't cooperate there. Lol

 

I had a blast... was a long ways from Idaho but well worth it... we scouted a ton of water day and night for the week we where here before the shoot... we didn't find much on table rock other than gar and had a blast shooting them so we took a gamble and shot stockton as we found consistant commons in the teen's when we scouted it... didn't turn out that great for us during the shoot we found nothing but small fish... we culled 30 commons from 3 to 4 pounds and only had one in our stringer that was over 10 pounds... but still worth the 26 hour drive to see some diffrent country...

 

What was the format again? Total weight or big 20/30?

 

Big 20

 

Great shoot but the lack of communication on changes to the take off time was a pain. Our troller died around 4 am so we weighed in early.. We were somewhere in the middle with 138 lbs. rough shooting but a great time. Got to meet a lot of people from all over the country. Loved it.

 

The winning team had 4 big grassys super nice stringer of fish.

 

Which lake produced the most top ten finishes. We were on Bull shoals and thought we had a good chance for a good load of Buffalo but they were gone?

 

Be nice if they'd move it around. I understand Springfield is headquaters and centrally located but other big shoots move around year to year. Just a thought.

 

Biggest event I've ever seen. It was great. We were on bull from midnight on. 7-10 boats in sight all night but seemed like everyone stayed out of each others way. Looking down into birds nest was strange. I think a 2 night shoot would be cool. Anybody get any good video?

 

Did anyone actually get a copy of all the final results?

 

Final results are on the us open Facebook page.


Does anyone know why they set a cutoff for the number of teams? The weigh in sheet only shows 190 of the 275 weighed in, would have been nice to see more teams on there.

 

The rest probably didn't even weigh. There were several teams that didn't kill any hardly

 

thanks to all of you guys for making this a exceptional week for Skippy, my wife,myself,and Joenida. as most of the field, our fish dropped out of site 8-12 hrs before the tournament. shooting fish in the daylight, in deep water, in the rain was simply crazy. but we felt very good after pulling up to the same ramp as muzzy and southern style. only problem was we had no back up plan. coming in 71st place wasn't the plan but given the conditions and being able to improvise adapt and overcome was the name of the game. the list of professionals I witnessed over the week really made me feel good. I was very impressed by how many of you take pride and represent our community well, for that I thank you.

 

one of the biggest things for me through the week was meeting Andy Cordell and the new spark that is the BAA. As many of you know in the past the BAA has been a little lackluster. I'm excited to see the new face at the helm and am encouraged to take it upon myself to be more proactive on a local level. The BAA needs this, as a association their biggest weapons to save bowfishing as we know it is troops on the ground. So when you get a chance go to their site and read some of the things that's been going on. Think a little on how you can help. most important thing you can do is get a membership, wear the shirt, and live the life of a advocate. we all want to better our state laws and regs but above all we just want to be able to keep what we have. as we all know there's safety in numbers that's why you should try to help if you can they are in the infant stages and every member is important.

 

Last Friday I could not locate a decent fish, moved to different section of lake and the wife and I counted over 20 20# commons, one pushing 30# and I shot for practice 15 5-10# and a 21# by mistake.

Back out on Tuesday, not near as many big fish but still counted 10+ 20# commons during scout and shot 10-15 5-10# fish for practice.

Back out Thursday night, getting scary, struggled to find a 20# fish, shot 5 5-10# fish for practice.

Saturday, stuck to same plan and mapped areas hoping it would turn around, went 6 hours without seeing a shootable fish, ended up only shooting 9 with a 7.6# average. We missed maybe two fish in same weight range so nothing lost to bad shooting. I didn't even want to weigh in.

Now the knife in the heart - We get to weigh in and top 20 are telling where they killed their big tubs of fish... Answer by many - Main lake area of Tablerock, yep that is 90% of what we fished, Main Lake Tablerock, so now they were lying or we just hit 15 miles of bad shoreline.

We were in pea gravel, rocky sloping edges, islands, one mud flat in a cove and pretty sure we hit all structure types.

My guess, the carp moved up or down lake and I made the mistake of sticking to my plans and mapped GPS areas even though I seen the trend. Lesson learned, maybe it will help you too.

 

Jp we stuck to our plan and shot main lake table rock also. Saw fish all week in our spots on every type of bank and in the muddy backs off coves. Come dark Saturday there was boat everywhere. We went to plan b about midnight only to find more boats.

Wonder what percent of boats went to what lakes and what type of boats placed? Any one hear how guys on Truman and Pomm did?

 

We saw one boat during pre-fish, played leap frog with 4-5 in our area only a couple times during the night.

 

Who won? Let's see the top 10 anyway. If it's on facebook some1 post it here for us non facebookers

 

TTT.

 

Couple suggestions for the future (even though I would never go back).
-how about let the Game Wardens in the area know that there will be a tournament going on and what exactly Bowfishing is. Kind of sucked getting pulled over twice and having to explain to the GW what we were doing, that there was a tournament going on, we weren't shining spotlights at them, etc etc etc. the GW told us that the only time we could have our "spotlights" on was when we were facing shore (while we were out on a flat) and we had to have our fish separated by who in the boat shot them.
-wouldn't been nice having the captains meeting right after the registration cut-off on Saturday. the 2 hour one way drive back to the bass pro just for the captains meeting was a little ridiculous on Friday.
-have the registration somewhere close to the where the main "fair" was located instead of in the back corner of the store in the lower level. Not sure why they didn't have a table set up right where the fair part of it was when you walked through the doors or at least a sign or something explaining where everything was at
-if you have a structure and rules, stick to them. there was an announcement from a PA that everyone was leaving an hour early. Our truck was over a mile away, no way that anyone in our lot could have heard it. Saw a guy show up an hour and a half late to weigh in and still go through the weigh in line.
-have some seating or bleachers or something at the weigh-in for people. the bass boats were nice to sit in, but there were only so many of them
-keep running teams through the line regardless of what they weighed in at. Just having something to look at instead of waiting for 5 minutes to have the next truck come through would've been nice and maybe kept folks more interested to stay for the weigh-in

that's about it. I think I'm still a little salty from the 12 hour drive.....

 

plus give teams a tub to put cull fish in and help dumping them soothe guy in front of u wouldn't spend 10 min gifting dunks out of his barrel. Plus half the staff in store couldn't answer our questions. Props to crew in package pickup warehouse these guys were great shared water fountain after we emptied our cooler took the time to show is the bathrooms. Even apologized for not having full size cups to drink out of... they were nicest employs we met there. I don't like crowds, haven't had 4 hours of sleep in 3 days and was kinda grumpy by the time it was over. I really appreciate JP and BASS PRO for supporting our sport but I'm gonna stick to the mail order for my purchases. Thanks JP for everything. Srod