Got down to Kentucky Lake over the weekend for the FLW National Guard College Fishing Central tournament. Hopes were pretty high going into the tournament. I was going to run some stuff over in Barkley. First stop I came to was loaded up with shad. My partner Mike McCarthy didn’t take long to hook up with a fat short on a spinnerbait. I worked the point over with a couple of different baits to no avail. We saw on the finder a bunch of bass coming up and chasing shad. We couldn’t get them to bite.

I decided to move down to the next secondary and Mike hooked up with a bass on a spinnerbait that was at least 6lbs. The fish came all the way out of the water 3 times and finally got off. It was a huge bummer to have such an opportunity get away. A little distraught we fished this secondary over and we both caught some fat shorts on a spinnerbait. I was throwing a tandem white Pig Sticker Spinnerbait. We also worked a bunch of different baits over the area and didn’t have much to show for it.

We came back out to the point and a couple of local guys had moved in on it and we were sharing it. There were fish comming up on the finder on shad still but we couldn’t get them to bite. We might have made the mistake in moving to that secondary cause looking back that fish that came up on the spinnerbait first thing in the morning was from a large school and we had probably missed out on the opportunity of putting 6 in the boat really quick. Without much luck we ran to my third spot and almost immediately began to catch shorts on a green pumpkin Pig Sticker jig and a brush hog. I’ve caught numerous limits off this spot over past years but there didn’t seem to be any keepers around it. I made a short run to a 4th  spot and we caught a lot more shorts without any keepers. One of them being a healthy 14 and a half inch smallmouth. We decided it was time to head back to the first stop to see what we could get.

The fish were unactive on the point so we headed back to where we had lost the 6lber and I immediately had my AiRRUS rod load up. I put a keeper largemouth in the boat on a spinnerbait. We pounded the area to death and caught some more shorts on senkos and jigs but couldn’t find a keeper. You never want to leave fish and the next move we made might have been the kiss of death.

We decided to work our way back hitting secondary points on Kentucky lake in hopes of possibly running into some fish. Hindsight is always 20/20 but this didn’t pan out. We ended up with comming in a disappointing 32nd place. The weights were low for the tournament with 12 pounds taking it and that big fish would have made a big difference and put us in around 7th place. That can be fishing. The highs are high and the lows are low. I could think of a hundred things I would have done differently looking back on the tournament. We tried to force some stuff instead of letting the fish tell us what they wanted. I felt like we were really close to making something big happen but we were just a little off.  I didn’t capitalize on the opportunity.