Minnetonka Tournament August 4th

[Steve Wood]

Sorry for the delay in getting these up, but below are the results from the Minnetonka tournament held last Saturday and the current overall standings for the MFL:

[Steve Wood]

So what was the winning pattern? What was used?

Dan caught almost all of our bass on rocks at or just outside of the deep weed line (about 14-18 ft deep). He used a 1/2 oz bass jig with a plastic crawfish trailer. I was fishing sucker minnows for northern and/or walleyes in the same area but caught only a few bass only one of which was big enough to make the final cut. The fish were biting really well right off the bat and we had a limit of fish over 14.5" shortly after 7 AM. We upgraded the smaller fish to 15.8" or better before the end of the day. We tried both leeches and minnows for walleyes but could only get bluegills on the leeches and only bass on the minnows. About 10 or so we went to another bay with lots of weeds to fish northern. We tried fishing up on top of the weeds around some reeds for about 10 minutes with no luck and then concentrated on the deep weed line. All 3 or our northern came on a jig with a small (5-6") sucker minnow in one area that appeared to have a harder bottom than most of the other sections we tried. Our 3rd northern was landed just before noon and we spent about an hour poking around in the shallows looking of bonus fish of which we caught none. We did see a perch or two but couldn't catch one. We spent the last hour trying to upgrade our pike, but did not catch a 4th fish. Actually Dan did have an 18" northern early on a jig that we threw back so I guess we caught 4 pike for the day 3 of which were 23-24" range. Our bluegills and 3 rock bass all came out of deep water while fishing for bass and walleyes.

I guess I'd have to say that the key for us was fishing in deeper water when the water temperatures were so warm. Dan's aerator was not operating at full flow early on and our fish started to look pretty lethargic. He fiddled with something and got it revved up and the fish did fine after that and seemed pretty spunky at the weigh-in. We culled one 15.8" fish that was just slightly heavier than another 15.8 fish just to keep the fresher of the two. There wouldn't have been any more than 1/2 an ounce difference.

Dan and I did not prefish for this event nor for Forest Lake. We did prefish briefly for Sugar since neither one of us had ever fished it before. Green will be interesting, but I doubt that either of us will have a chance to prefish that either.

[Teng]

My wife and I started out around big island in my big pike spot. It didn't produce. We worked it for about 2 hours with nothing to show for. We then moved to the small channel and started working the lilly pads. First cast with a frog, I landed one of our bass. At first, I had a medium fast rod with the frog on. I started casting deeper into the lilly pads and after a good cast, I saw a BIG WAKE, I mean BIG, and had a top water explosion. I let it sit for a sec then set the hook and wrestled the fish to about 5 ft from the boat and lost it to the lilly pads.. My heart sanked because I had just lost a BIG BASS... I quicked switched to a medium heavy, rod. I kept castng around and around the pads, hoping to get the fish to bit again. After about 10-15 minutes of casting, I finally hooked up on the giant again. This time I was able to get it to the boat. I was SOOOOOOOO excited until I saw it up close and realized it was a DOG FISH.. DOH~!.. At this point, I realized how my day was going to go.. We struggled to find fish and the 4 bass for 5.55lbs was the result..

[Dan Wood]

scum frogs in 40 fow.. seems to work best in just about every lake and amazingly all times of the year!

The bass came on a 1/2 oz and 5/8 oz football jig w/ chigger craw. Wish we could of fished bass longer once again but we had to move on to other species.. I think I was rigging for walleyes by about 7:30 or so.. fished off and on a bit with the jig until we upgraded a couple more.. gills wouldn't leave my jumbo leeches alone, we gave up on walleyes eventually and went to our pike area.. no free pike in the morning, just one short one on the jig.. we had to work for our 3 pike as they didn't seem to be very active in the areas we were fishing anyway.. we finally got our 3rd keeper pike just before noon along a weedline that normally is good for us.. all 3 were out near the tip of a pt that didn't have a lot of structure but but was the only spot in that area with hard bottom.. We pissed away the rest of the day trying to get a dogfish or perch.. Only excitement I had was a big fish that broke off my 50lb power pro while punching mats for dogfish or a kicker bass.. I think it was probably a big dogfish but could of been a bigger bass... probably a weak spot in my line to break the 50lb line but it was a big fish for sure.. It didn't give an inch with a very heavy flip'n stick.. Other than that we saw one perch but it didn't stick around for us. We spent the last 30 minutes trying to upgrade a pike with no luck..

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I see you got the results posted, was finally getting to it here... I put the photos and results up on the website.

http://mnmfl.com

[Steve Wood]

Come on Rob. It's your turn to tell us how you and Terry produced your nice bag of bass and northern.

[rjruda]

Sorry for the late response, as I just got back to town after leaving early Sun morning to join my family up on vacation at Lake Koronis ( report to follow tonight or tomorrow).

Tonka was both fun and frustrating for me and Terry. We pulled up to our first spot wanting to fish some pads to learn that I had a fuse melt on my trolling motor (joys of a new boat). We wasting about a half hour messing around with it and not getting it to work. So, we decided to fish the weed flat out in front of the pads, this flat started about 5 FOW and slowly dropped to 10 FOW and then quickly dropping to 15 FOW. We spent about 4 hours just moving the boat to different areas and letting the wind drift us over the weeds. We pretty much just threw spinnerbaits to catch all our fish. We had a limit of bass by 7:30 and were able to upgrade so the smallest bass we brought to the scales was 14.75". We also caught our 2 keeper pike this way. We probably caught 30 fish doing this, 10 of those were small pike. Our one bonus fish ( crappie) also caught in this spot on a spinnerbait. We tried throwing jibs, worms, crankbaits, and rattle traps with limited success in this spot.

We then headed west to Halstad's Bay for a short period of time, it was going to work to fish the spots we wanted without a trolling motor. So we then headed back to Spring Park and fished a weed point that extended of the west side and caught a couple of small bass.

Looking forward to Green since I have never been on it