Fear & Loathing on the BBTS: Jacks Lake 2012

This past weekend Dustin and I took part in our final scheduled tournament of the 2013 season on Jacks Lake in Apsley, Ontario. Though we dont often do well on this lake, we enjoy the fishery and the group of guys that participate.. Congrats to Jay Hotzak and Russ Watkins who took home 1st place for the second year in a row.. Dustin and I should have stock to our original game plan.. Following them!

Big fish at this years event was a beast weighing in at 6.37lbs, congrats to Justin Slydock and Sctodd Bubec for taming the beast.

Though an odd weather day, it was by far the best weather we have had for an event this year. The day started out sunny yet cool with temps at around 10 degrees (our 50f for my american readers), and quickly heated up to a day time high of 24c (75f), as the morning wore on the winds picked up (15SW) and really cooled things off again. Our game plan for this lake was to spend a lot of time in the shallows and pound the hell out of shorelines, timber and weedbeds. To our surprise the water level was a good 2 feet lower then it was the last time on the lake. This made a few of our standard sports nearly un- fishable, and left us looking for new water early and often

Before the wind picked up we were able to boat 3 fish all on topwater frogs, the biggest being 2.8lbs that gave us an early bag of 6.5lbs.. happy, happy. The wind quickly ruined the frog bite, and the shallow conditions forces us to fish the mouth of bays, but did not allow us to push back in, where we usually found the majority of out fish.

Flipping is how we spent the majority of our day, we found what large weed-beds there where, and drifted along flipping and pitching every little hole we could find. We culled 4 times in the last 3 hours, all small culls that only raised our weight up to just over 9.5lbs. (yeah not exactly a winning bag). With a 3hr drive ahead of us, we decided to weigh in a bit early (20 minutes) but when we arrived at the weigh-in station it was not manned and not set-up. This was pretty frustrating and was the main reason we decided to just dump our bag and call it a day

and thus ends our 2013 tournament season, we had some highs points, including a 9th place finish on Weslemkoon and the fact that we broke into a new series with two performances that i was happy with. We also saw out share of low points and personal frustrations, that I will be turning into a Top 10 things not to while tournament fishing

again congrats to those who took home hard earned cheques and hardware, and we will see ya in 2014