College FLW National Qualifier 9-30-18

[David Goddard]

We practice fished on Thursday and Friday and the college tournament Saturday. All 3 days we fished about half of the day from Coffman and Half of the Day from PB1.

Day 1, on Thursday we caught good fish off of main lake docks and docks off secondary points in the Lower end area on jigs and wacky rigged senkas. We put in at PB1 at about 3 in the afternoon and made it al the way to the Swinging Bridges in a 20 ft fiberglass bass boat. Didn't catch many fish up there accept off one specific bank we caught 5 fish in about 3 minutes, one of them being a 5+. We left the rest of that bank saving it for tourney day. Shad were everywhere. I have never seen so many shad in my life that were up the creek.

Day 2 we started at PB1 and fished a ton of the bank that was similar to the places where we were catching fish on Thursday but caught only a few shorts and one that was 3.25. Could not figure out why the fish were only in that one stretch yesterday but we presumed that they would still be there on tournament day. When we fished Coffman we fished some shallow docks with a fair amount of success catching a couple nice Kentucky's and one decent 3 pound largemouth. Fished some brush that was in 10-20 feet and the deeper the brush was the better it seemed but didn't catch many keepers out of there and if they were keepers they were only 15-16 inchers.

Day 3 we ran from PB2 to the dam area to where we had been catching a ton of keepers for the last month and couldn't catch a fish over 13 inches. Ran to a spot around Alhonna and caught 2 keepers. The sun came out and we ran back to our good docks at the dam area and that's when I caught the 5.5 pounder on a neko rig. Then we ran all the way from within sight of the dam all the way up the Glaize past PB1 where we caught them on Thursday and we only caught 2 shorts. Got beat to death in the boat traffic, it was absolutely terrible. I guess everyone with a big cruiser thought it was their last day to get some decent weather because they were everywhere. Very frustrating day of driving. My partner and I should have just stayed in the lower end and tried to catch 2 more keepers instead of running up the river, but hindsight is always 20-20. None of the 9 teams from Mizzou qualified for nationals. One team missed by half a pound. My partner and I had 9-8 for 3 fish. It took 14-00 to qualify, so if we could've caught 2 more keepers that were 2.25 or a little bigger we would have made it. Get 'em next time I guess. Thanks for reading guys. Tight Lines.