2-15-2014 ICA Turtle Creek Lake

2-15-2014 ICA held its Annual Turtle Creek Open Sponsored by Hoosier Energy.

The night before my wife and I drove down to sleep at the gate and be ready in the morning. When gates opened we got the boat launched and parked and i went inside and helped the ICA take registrations and talked with a bunch of the guys. My wife slept more in the truck.

I had fished this tournament last year and developed a plan for this year. So i knew exactly where i was going and what i was going to do.

The first year i fished it i had brought way too big of hooks and gear. So this year i brought my lighter action poles hooked down to 3/0 circles and bait i had night crawlers, chicken livers hearts & gizzards soaking in blood and shad guts.

We was in the first group of 25 to take off and i slowly made my way to my spot. I anchored up and began throwing lines out the back of the boat. We sat there and got a few nibbles and i thought i wonder if my Humminbird 360 will work in this shallow of water around 3-4 ft. So i popped it down and sure enough it did and it also showed me there was hardly any fish at the back of the boat but there was a lot in front. So we started throwing lines off the front and BAM! We was catching them like crazy. I would estimate we had caught 40-50+ channel cats. I had about 30 of the better sized ones in my livewell. Brandy (My wife) and I had a blast. We did not think or know how well we had done compared to others but we had fun and thats all we cared about.

When i got the boat trailered and was ready to start getting my fish for weighing in i had so many in the livewell it would have took forever to weigh each fish now. (This was my mistake of the tourney) So i started just grabbing the ones that looked like the biggest from eyeballing them. I picked out ten of the ones i felt were my biggest but in kind of a hurry. We went to the weigh in line and a few people looked at our fish and thought we had this thing won. When we weighed in we had 18.3 lbs we found out 1st place had 18.5 so only 2 ounces more than us.

I thought i probably made the mistake just eyeballing the fish so i went and checked my livewell and compared a few fish and i am pretty sure i had at least 4 fish left in my livewell that were bigger than some of the ones i weighed in. I was ok with it though. Things like that are what teach us not to do them in the future.

There was 107 boats in this tournament and my wife and i finished in 2nd place!

I purchased a fish culling system that will help me with not making that mistake again in the future and i really want to thank Humminbird and my 360 for without that tool im sure i would have done as well as i did in this tournament.