West Michigan Bass 2K Jigs Lakeshore Shootout Wrap Up
When Monday nights start to wrap up it is a sign that summer is fading away. This year is a little different in that we have a Classic coming up (if you fished 10 out of 12 events). While I’m ready to transition to salmon jigging, it is hard to be upset about a weeknight classic (combined weight from 2 Monday events) with a bunch of extra money in the pot. Todd Elliott Farm Bureau kicked in 500 bucks to the classic which is a pretty sweet deal for all the anglers.
Before the chaos of school starting again now is a great time to check in with Todd about your insurance policies. Business, auto, home, life, he is very knowledgeable in all of them and will make sure you have the right coverage. When we switched to Todd, he saved us around 800 dollars too and with better coverage. We don’t have a huge pool of companies kicking in to these events, so as fisherman it is important to recognize the companies that are supporting our events. I’m happy to put anyone in direct contact with Todd or you find all his information here.
Back to Mondays, we had a pretty good season. Winning was elusive though, I think we finished 2nd 3 times, which actually pays pretty good with 35-40 boats. Every tournament is no joke with so many boats. Just like a weekend tournament it can be hard to get on places that you want to fish. The competition level is stiff too, there are lots of guys who can catch them. With so many people fishing someone always gets them too. It isn’t like a 10 boat weeknight tournament where sometimes every team struggles and you can get by with a mediocre night, someone always gets them here. If you hope to do decent in the points just catching a limit every tournament isn’t going to cut it either. Fishing on the lakeshore is pretty good but if you can catch a limit in 3.5 hours on all 12 events I think that is a pretty good accomplishment. But even then, you are going to need better than average limits to maintain some good points. Over 12 events we had a 13.41 pound average which is dang hard to do an involves some lucky breaks for sure. One 10 pound night just crushes you because so many teams are going to be between you and the winners. Lucky for us, we didn’t have many of those really tough nights. We had some nights that were tough but they looked good on paper. A couple good bites and some 2 pounders can really salvage a weeknight tournament.
We bounced around in the top 3 in points all summer but going into the final event we had an 8-point lead on 2nd place and would have to really struggle to get caught by anyone else. A mid-August tournament can be feast or famine on Muskegon and just like most tournaments we were just going fishing without any practice. Winning the points is always pretty cool no matter what series you fish but there would be some real implications here. First is a good boat number for the WMB Classic on Houghton Lake. Having a good number can be very important on that place and I never get one. Next is take off number for the Monday Classic. Which honestly, we’ll have no where to go on White Lake next week and we probably aren’t going to practice.
Back to the tournament, it at least wasn’t windy for once. We had some options and our start was probably going to dictate which direction we went. We have a D&R out there in a couple weeks so I was hoping to lay off some of the real specific stuff and not risk using a fish that we might catch in D&R. But if we really needed it to catch a nice one, it was on the table. We felt pretty good about catching a limit the last couple hours but really needed a good one in the first hour. The first fish was a 3 pounder and the next fish was a 4 pounder on a flipping stick. We added 2 more keepers pretty quick and then went and got number 5. We had enough to probably seal up angler of the year at that point. It is funny because one of the places we had some success wasn’t even on the radar to fish but it just felt right. This also meant we could lay off some stuff and really work hard to get a couple good bites at the end of night.
We traded a couple of the smaller largemouth out and added a smallmouth just shy of 4 pounds (first bass with the Bates EDC reel). Figuring we were just one bite away from getting our first win of the season. Trevor got that bite although it’s possible it wasn’t a bass, everything about it made it seem bassy to us. Halfway back to the boat it just came off and that one hurt. It was our night though and in the end it didn’t matter. We weighed 15.89 with a 4.02 big bass and finally got that win/cutting board trophies we’ve been after. Surprisingly someone else had a 4.02 also but tie breaker goes to biggest bag so we got it. I’ve never had that happen before, I felt bad, but it was nice to be on that end of it. First place in the points and first take off boat and a great take off number at the classic came with it. It was a great night and it was also good to see Cameron and Kelsey weigh in a nice bag and get 3rd. They’ve had some unlucky tournament breaks so it was great to see persistence pay off at the end of the season.
I’d like to thank Dave, Kyle, Pat, and Byker for doing such a great job running these again. It is no small task to deal with this many boats and having almost everyone weigh fish in every night plus any tournament angler drama that might occur. Then there are the sponsors unique to our league 2K Jigs, Nick Holtrop at Blu House Properties, One Step Up Landscaping, Style Installation Group, and Todd Elliott Farm Bureau Insurance. Also Andrew Contat for filling in for me when I was on vacation this summer. Looking forward to the final 2 events and a bunch of salmon jigging!