I teamed up with Mark Sanner, Steve Nigro & Bryan Reilly to take a run at the Walmart FLW Striper Series Tourney held in New London, CT. this Saturday 6/21/08.
I got to do a little pre-fishing with Mark on Friday and we fine tuned some of our trolling tactics, for the real game.
After the Captain's meeting Friday night our team set a plan of attack and we met early at Boat's Inc in Niantic Saturday morning for the ride over to the staging area at the New London Town Pier. Mark was at the helm for the day and we had a great ride in his beautiful Grady White 24' CC.
Anyhow, we had our plan but really struggled to find a decent bite in the early am. However, we stuck with the T-Man Tubes and finally found a perfect slot fish at 31.5" and 16lbs. Steve banged her with a Bubblegum tube at the very end of the turning tide.
Whew..... that was a relief to have a really good fish in the box!!
The balance of the am tide we spent at the Race where it was obvious the bite was way off for everyone in that area. We were about to make a move to do some more tubing when Bryan managed to hook a fish on a bucktail at the same time he was moving around the bow and drinking a bottle of water he had just plucked from the cooler.
We all thought it was a bluedog but when the leader came up there was a flash of stripes underneath... we started getting excited and shouting out speculations about whether or not it was a keeper slot fish....
It was, Hot Damn!!! 31.5" again and around 14 or 15lbs.
We stared at that fish for a few minutes while making our decision to throw it back and try for a bigger fish or put it in the box thus ending our day. There is "no culling" in NY waters so once you put the fish in the keep alive tube you gotta keep it. With the slow bite and the thought of taking turns kicking eachother in the arse if we released and didn't score, we put that fish in the box and were back at FLW headquarters tied up next to the release boat at 11:30am.
We had to wait till the scales opened at 2:30 and were the 1st to put up some numbers. We weighed are fish jumped into Mark's Grady and returned to our homeport in Niantic to un-load and clean the boat up. The whole time chatting about the chances of our 28lbs 10oz tally holding up. That was the fun part knowing we had two good fish and wondering where we would finish.
So into the cars and back over to New London to catch the end of the weigh-in and see how we did. When we got there only 1 boat was left to weigh in and we found out our fate.
2nd Place!!!! getting beat out for 1st by just 2oz!
All in all in was a great day and our team fished hard and smart. Not to mention a nice helping of luck thrown in to find those fat fish. The prize money wasn't to hard to take either
Special thanks to Boat's Inc. in Niantic for sponsoring Team Reelnice for the tourney...
Here's a few pics...
Part of the tourney fleet ready for take-off.
The Boys hanging around after we returned with our fish
All of us on stage during the weigh-in
2nd Place
