To continue on from last week’s post, I wanted to write about the remainder of our first bass fishing tournament. As I left off last week, we had a full livewell of bass and were on our way to the weigh-in with a bit of hope that we might be able to squeeze in for a monetary prize.
As we pulled into the shore, my son guided the boat to a spot that would allow us to pull up on shore and then get our fish to the weigh-in as quickly as possible. Now this part of the adventure, we hadn’t really planned for, but thought hey how hard can it be to put 5 bass into a bag. Well it wasn’t as easy as we had envisioned.
To get the bass from your livewell to the weigh-in spot, you use what amounts to a large zip lock bag. Now our bag had never been used and honestly had come with the boat. Since our boat is older, think bags have come quite a ways since ours was put into the boat so we may have looked a bit like amateurs but that was ok. We filled the bag with water and my son began the process of transferring fish. Trying to get them out of a livewell and into the bag without dropping any of them proved to be quite the task. I was laughing in the background as he finally grabbed the net and trapped them into the net so we could get them to the bag. Somehow the boat next to us wasn’t having any issues. Guess we have some work to do on this part of the process.
We finally loaded the fish into the bag and began the sprint to the weigh-in tank. Did I forget to mention that our bag may have had a hole? Good thing for my son’s long strides. We got them to the tank and crossed our fingers that none of them would be belly up. It made us feel good that as we were standing in line we heard a few comments regarding how nice our fish looked. All both of us could think was, we had a chance. Finally it was our turn. We handed the judge our small fish participant and as the tail crossed the 12 inch line, I thought we had it in the bag. The scale read 1.10 pounds and all I could think of was YES!!!!! We had to have won that one. He turned around and said too bad, you are now in second place as smallest fish is sitting at 1.09 pounds. Wow, I could have probably squeezed .01 pounds of water off of him. Oh well now on to the big fish.
He grabbed our lunker and registered it at 3+ pounds. I glanced at the leader board and saw that it wasn’t going to win but it was a solid showing. Our overall bag weighed in at 10.91 pounds and at the time we were in 4th place. Now mind you there were many boats yet to weigh in, but at least we weren’t showing the big goose egg. They put our fish back into the bag and we hauled them back to the lake. In they went and I am proud to say, no floaters so a successful day for us.
We went back to the weigh-in area to see how things were progressing and we slowly watched us slide down the chart as more boats weighed in. Once we slid out of the money, we headed back to the boat and to the cabin to get some food, drink and to clean up as our day wasn’t over yet. One of the highlights of the whole tournament was still approaching, the awards banquet!!
Included in our entry fee was a dinner and awards at the local American Legion. I probably hadn’t mentioned this yet, but should as this tournament was a fund raiser for American Legion Post 108 in Le Center, MN, (American Legion Post 108). The money raised from the tournament goes towards teach area children about US Patriotic Symbols, supporting local veterans, the American Legion Post itself, and other organizations such as DARE and the local food shelf. For both my son and I, this was a great cause and a great reason for us to enter this contest.
We headed off to the legion for dinner and upon arriving were greeted by just the whole small town flavor to events. A lot of laughing, camaraderie and just people getting out to visit with other people. I got the sense we were the only ones not from the local area, but honestly that didn’t bother us. We pulled up to a table and before you know it we were engaged in some great conversation regarding fishing and also hunting.
We were treated to a dinner of steak and shrimp, salad, bread sticks and of course dessert. A cash bar was also available, along with a silent auction, raffle prizes and door prizes, (which we didn’t figure out we needed to register for). The whole prize awarding process did get kind of long, but the folks in the room didn’t seem to mind. There was a ton of hooting and hollering along with laughing and just some good old fashioned conversation. My son and I were entertained by the folks at the table and when one of their tickets was announced as the winner of the shotgun, the table exploded with yelling, (some of it not totally age appropriate), and laughing.
The evening concluded with a huge thanks to everyone and the announcement that the winner of the tournament landed 24 pounds of fish and also won the biggest fish with a 6 pound trophy. My son and I both agreed that we weren’t sure our livewell could have held something that big.
As we headed off towards home, we both reflected on how much fun we had and what could have been and things we need to adjust/change for next year. It was a great time and we learned lots which somewhere in our goals for the day, we seemed to miss. Our goals for next year will definitely be different and somehow within all of those goals we need to keep a couple of things in perspective. First off, we need to have fun, can’t get totally caught up in the competition side of things. And secondly and probably most importantly, the event is for a great cause and just us participating we are helping the cause and supporting the veterans who have served their country so we can live as we do today.
Outdoors in Minnesota 