15th Place finish out of 180 Pros FLW BFL Lake of the Ozarks

Yesterday managed to catch some fish in the FLW BFL down at Lake of the Ozarks. I ended up in 15th place out of 180 Pros on I guess what you could consider my home lake even though it's a bout 3 hours away. Practice was super tough. I ended up going down the weekend before the tournament to do some scouting and the fishing reports all said I was going to be in for a tough bite.

The weekend before the tournament on Saturday I cracked them really good. I had 5 bass that would have been pushing probably 19lbs easily or maybe more. I caught all these fish on a stretch that I've never even fished before but it just looked good on my Garmin maps. I ended up checking it out again on Sunday just to see if it was going to be one of those good spots that would keep reloading and I failed to even get a bite there. So ended up spending the second half of the day further up lake looking for any sign of activity.

Most of the time in these early spring tournaments if you don't find a concentration of fish to sit on for the whole day you are going to be in for a long tournament. Fish this time of the year really tend to bunch up and run and gun style of fishing doesn't usually work out to well no matter how well you know the lake. Believe me I have spent a lot of days on Lake of the Ozarks. I ended up catching a couple nice ones on a spot that I would end up fishing during the tournament.

Thursday before the BFL I ended up having a mediocre day of fishing up towards the Dam. I caught one fish that was about 5lbs and a couple of keepers to go with it but kept thinking to myself the water could change drastically as we were going to be getting several inches of rain. I wanted to fish the area that I would fish in the tournament on Friday allowing for the water to warm throughout the whole week so that if I could catch a few fish on Friday I would have the confidence to go fish those areas. I ended up getting out a little late on Friday because I spent about 15 hours on the wate the day before and checked a couple areas and caught one keeper off the spot I would fish the whole tournament day.

Saturday during the tournament I made a big run to my starting spot and had two nice 3lbers in the boat before 10 o clock. I decided to stick around and my spot produced a smaller kentucky bass that also went in the livewell. On Lake of the Ozarks there's just a 12inch length limit on Spotted bass so my 14 incher kept. I was wondering during the day if I should just keep grinding it out or find some different water to fish and luckily I had enough confidence to stay in my area because at about 1 o'clock I caught my biggest fish of the day which was over 5lbs.

Time flew by and I ended up weighing in my 4 keepers for a little over 11lbs which surprisingly was good and I was able to beat out a lot of the local sticks on a wet and miserable day.

After this tournament I'm currently ranked 7th in our division and we got 3 more events to go. Let's hope I can keep up the consistency because I want to fish the regional this fall and have a shot at winning that boat!