Seth

What a day!

How is this possible?! That’s my favorite wild fame to eat.

Congratulations BH!

Aside from KVD, I'm not doing that great this tourney. I did however realize that I'm ahead of Champ, but not Ketchup. Since this will probably never happen, I had to take a screenshot so as to not forget how great I was for one day.

Thankfully he did not! Once I got a look at those things, I was thinking that would NOT have felt good! That longest one was freakin sharp!

Finally sealed the deal on my second bird this morning and it wasn't a jake this time. Was trying to get the boss a shot and the dang birds came in where he couldn't get a shot and I ended up shooting as they began to turn and walk away. 23.5#, 10.25" beard, 1 1/8" and 1 3/8" spurs In case you are wondering why I have a hand full of tail feathers in the first picture, it's because I had to tackle the turkey and step on his head after the shot. There was a little brush in the way when I shot and I guess I didn't get quite enough shot in him to stone cold kill him. When I got up to him, his head was still up and he started flopping down the woods. I dove after him and fell a bit short and ended up getting his fan and yanking half of it out. The second time I full blown tackled him and rolled a time or two before I stomped on his head to finish him off. My boss told me that dive would have made Pete Rose proud! If only I had been wearing the GoPro....

Went out this morning and heard two groups of birds gobble just a few times on the roost and then all went quiet. I slipped in on the ridge above where I heard one group and sat down, but never did see or hear anything from them. After waiting a while, I slipped down to where I had heard them gobble and found fresh gobbler droppings beneath the roost tree. I have no clue where those birds ended up going. I thought I had them pretty well cornered to where they would have had to walk my way, but I was wrong.

The co-angler champ was only out fished by his boater one day and that was by Mike McClelland, who is arguably the best angler fishing this tournament on TRL. He stomped his boaters the first two days. That really is amazing! Chad G Allison Day 1: 15-7 Peter Wenners 9-3 Day 2: 16-2 Brandon Bolton 11-10 Day 3: 8-1 Mike McClelland 9-0

So Duane is human and actually gets his butt handed to him by the fish once in a while?

This video is from the weekend before. I imagine it's still fishing about the same. The fish will move up shallow and feed during the last hour or two before dark. We also fished the dead channel below Truman dam Thursday and Friday. It wasn't anything to write home about, but we managed to catch 25 keeper crappie, 5 blue cats and 5 whites on Thursday and 18 crappie, 3 blue cats and 1 white bass on Friday using minnows and just slowly moving around with the trolling motor.

I made my fourth sit this morning and FINALLY saw a legal bird, which was a jake. It's been a few years since I've taken a jake, but with the lack of gobbling and not really much to go after, I decided I was going to at least make sure I filled a tag and got some turkey breast this season. The fact that the jakes actually gobbled and worked in like a big bird made me a little less guilty about shooting one. I've got the rest of season to try and find a tom. I'm going to throw in the towel on what is normally my honey hole and go check out some other properties. Hopefully I'll stumble across a tom that wants to talk and actually work in."

Congrats to mrs. Billethead!

So did AiA handle the split or did you just make two copies and then each put down half of the amount?

We've always split tournament winnings 50/50, but those are just cash prizes so not taxes to worry about. If one were to win a boat or a large amount such as in the BBB, wouldn't you have to figure up how much taxes are going to come out of the earnings and then split that 50/50? Otherwise, whoever gets the check would also get a 1099 and get a lot less money after taxes are taken out. With a federal tax rate of 24% and 4% on state taxes, you'd be splitting 70% of the winnings instead of the full amount, right?

Have you met some of these biologists that MDC employs? Most of the ones I have met don't have a clue about hunting or fishing. The crap we've heard some of them tell us about deer on managed deer hunts is laughable. "The deer rut was in early October". Last year somebody said one was telling them that the crappie were in full spawn on LoZ in FEBRUARY!

The woods were fairly dead this morning. Heard one bird gobble a lot to the SW and one a long ways off to the north. Neither was anywhere close to the ground I was hunting. I heard some yelping towards the middle of the property that sounded "jake"ish. I wish I could have hunted longer as I think the activity will get better as the morning goes on.

Tomorrow morning is going to be chilly, but the wind will be calm. A guy should at least hear a bird if he gobbles.

We always catch fish, but being that it's a big fish tourney, you still have to be lucky. It pays out for the top 10 fish of the day and we've only placed twice in the nine Snagmaster events that we have fished. The second year we fished it, we only caught two fish and lucked in to a 72 pounder. Two years ago we caught several small males and then hit a 78-8 sow that took first. Most years we've caught 8-12 fish and not won anything though. It really is a crap shoot.

I wish I was fishing it. I'll be up on the Osage arm fishing the Snagmasters tournament (aka the redneck version of the BBB).

It's going to be cold and windy in the morning so I think I am going to pass and wait till Tuesday before I venture to the woods. Three weeks is plenty of time to get on some birds so I'm not in a big hurry just yet.

Pa He Tsi was shut down due to low water so we had to put in amongst the AiA madness at PB2. We ended up catching our two limits of mostly 10-11.5” fish with quite a few sows, but never did catch any tourney quality fish. That explains why there weren’t any crappiemaster boats in the area..... The wind was brutal. We ended up catching half of our fish shooting jigs on one dock and the other half came from vertical jigging various brush piles in the area that were in 15-25’ of water.

I love to shoot docks, but the wind may make that difficult tomorrow. On top of the wind, there will be 150+ bass boats fishing AIA and other tourneys in the area ripping arund as well. We may have to go hide in a cut with brush and hope the fish are there just to survive the day.

That water is still cold. Main lake is probably still in the low 50's with some pockets reaching mid 50's. Not to rub salt in the wound, but you're one of the few that I've talked to this week that has fished LoZ this week and not slaughtered the crappie, especially those that have fished the past two days. Lots of very good quality fish as well. I'm heading up to fish the Glaize tomorrow so I should have a report of my own to add to the forum afterwards.

That’s what I get for skipping the reading and focusing on those pretty drawings.

That is simply amazing Al! Question.... are you using a touch screen and a pointer device when doing your drawings in Photoshop or just using a mouse?