2nd Place Finish Tri-County Bass Club Open Jerkbait Tournament

I rolled into Osage Beach, MO around 2am the night before the tournament. I was headed back from fishing the FLW BFL on Percy Priest Lake. I was going to be borrowing Ryan Jordan's bass boat and fishing a tournament with his 15 year old neighbor Zack. I was surprised when I got to Ryan's house at 2am that everyone was still up. I figured everyone would be asleep. We stayed up a little because I had to spool up all my reels with some 8lb Vicious Fluorocarbon because I was going to be throwing Jerkbaits all day long and that is the line that I use for my jerkbait fishing. I hadn't been on Lake of the Ozarks for over a month and a half so I figured I would run the whole lake and try to get a handful of bites. I ended up running way up the Glaize and managed to get one keeper in the boat pretty early on. I also lost a close to keeper spotted bass. Normally it would have been a keeper but this tournament had 15 inches on all fish across the board. After not doing so hot I ran all the way to the Dam and hit a couple more spots to no avail. I made another move and finally caught keeper number two along with half a dozen shorts. It was then that I began to unlock the pattern. I made a move up into the Gravois arm to a similar spot and I managed to catch two more keepers one of them being over 4lb which earned 4th biggest fish over all. Also I managed to catch another fish that was almost 4lbs. I was running out of time because it was about 2:15 and we had to be back around 3 o'clock to weigh our fish in. I had enough time to hit a couple more spots and managed to catch a couple more shorts but we ended up out of time. It was great to give Zack the experience of his first ever real tournament. Even though he didn't catch much he kept a positive attitude all day and I think he saw first hand how a crappy day can turn into a great day because we ended up taking 2nd place overall and collecting a nice check on a day that was brutally tough on everyone who fished. We also caught the 4th biggest bass of the tournament which earned Zack some Elite Anglr gear. We lost the tournament by .01 lbs. It took 12.01lbs to win the tournament and we had 12lbs even. The tournament rounded out a great weekend of fishing for me collecting two checks back to back. Fishing is going to continue to improve as things start to warm up around here and I'm sure I'll start to really catch some fish. Stay tuned because I got a lot of tournaments coming up.