D&R Sports Tournament Hardy Dam - Practice

Hardy Dam is a curveball for our D&R series as usually it is just lakeshore lakes until the classic. But with no east division this year we added some events and mixed it up. It was going to be a true wildcard for us. I’ve fished a couple spring tournaments there, one June tournament, and one D&R Classic. Trevor had never been before so it would be completely new to him. But new challenges/adventures are fun and regardless of how the event went, it would be a learning experience.

I at least had an idea of what we were about to get into and kind of a lay of the land. The lake is big and very different with it being a reservoir. It’s also really a pretty spot to fish with it mostly being natural shoreline owned by Consumers Power Company. I expected nothing from the spring events to matter but had a glimmer of hope that what worked really well on a practice day for the previous June event would work or at least get us some bites.

We got there early to avoid the heat, boat traffic, and maximize that early bite. It was our best chance at getting a real clue of what was going on. I feel like being there early when nature is giving you the most clues is so important especially on unfamiliar waters and tough bites. Let’s just say it started slowly and we only got 3 blowups plus a couple of pike bites. Only one of those bites was on something that I felt was repeatable. That fish was sitting on a thicker grass clump and I marked it for later. It would for sure be a high percentage spot to pick up a keeper. The topwater window was fading and we were just bouncing around trying a variety of things. There sure were a lot of small and unhealthy pike in that fishery. We did end up catching a lot of walleyes too and they also appeared to be in similar condition.

I wasn’t seeing anything impressive with my MEGA Side Imaging as far as grass goes. There was plenty of wood though, so much of it that it would be hard to find anything productive without fishing it. I did find one tree with some life so that one went in the memory bank for tournament day. We ended up in the same area as a good friend who was also practicing. He was getting some action out deeper and pointed us in that direction. I wasn’t ready to totally commit out there but it pushed us out sooner than we had planned. We were in a fishy area of the lake and it didn’t take long to start putting it together out there. 2 things were critical for finding productive areas out deep. One was Humminbird’s MEGA Live 2, without that we would have just been lost. The other is the depth shading on the Lakemaster VX maps. We could look at the map and if 2 particular colors of depth shading met and it had the right steepness, we had a very good chance to find some smallmouths around.

We could tell that bite was fading and we had come up with a few areas with life so it was back to bouncing around with some other ideas. We were able to produce a couple big largemouth bites fishing shallow (one was an absolute magnum) and uncovered a stretch that produced a few jig bites. The largemouth really seemed like a wildcard for us. But if things worked out with the smallmouth, getting a big bite up shallow could be the key to success.

Despite having a good day weight wise, we weren’t really on anything great. There wasn’t any particular “spot” I felt we could pull up on and for sure catch them. Also most of our smallmouth were just singles on the MEGA Live 2, so it wasn’t like we had a place with a big school of them. It could go either way on tournament day but I felt like we had a good opportunity to at least get our 5 with maybe a couple nice ones or if things went right we could get 5 of the right ones. If we could just get 5 though, we could survive this unfamiliar fishery and get some good points. Based on all the practice talk if you could get to 13 pounds, there was a good chance of getting paid. All that was left to do was make the drive back up there and catch whatever we could catch.