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Editor’s note: This is the second piece in a series of journal entries from Dave Andrews, winner of the 2007 TBF National Championship, detailing his third stop on the 2008 FLW Series Eastern schedule. Entries will be published at FLWOutdoors.com throughout the course of the season. As winner of the “Living the Dream” package, offered by FLW Outdoors through The Bass Federation, Andrews had his entry fees paid to test his club skills on the pro tour with the use of a fully wrapped boat and tow package. Andrews will chronicle his adventure in pro bass fishing, having most recently competed on New York’s Lake Champlain. After Andrews has submitted his journal following each FLW Series event, segments will be posted approximately weekly. (Read Part 1)(Read his Wheeler Lake journal; this links to the final entry, which provides links at the top for each preceding part)
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Walmart FLW Series BP Eastern Division
Stop No. 3: Lake Champlain
Sept. 10-13, 2008
Official practice
Sept. 5
On the first official practice day for the third stop on the BP Eastern Division Series, I left Massachusetts at 4 a.m. and headed for Grand Isle, Vt., to pick up the “Living the Dream” Ranger where I had left it 10 days earlier. The drive up was uneventful, and my practice partner Scott Leppanen, also registered as a co-angler for the tournament, and I arrived around 10 a.m. We hooked up the boat and headed for a nearby launch that would give us good access to the Northern Inland Sea area.
The day was warm and sunny with plenty of blue sky and a strong south wind. There were 4-footers rolling through the Inland Sea, and we knew mobility would be hampered by the conditions. We were the only trailer in the parking lot, and we headed right out into the nastiest part of the lake. The time for messing around was over: I needed to find fish, and if we got blasted by the wind and waves, so be it.
We started our day in fairly shallow water, looking to see if the smallmouths had moved up from their deep-summer haunts yet. I threw a Carolina-rigged Zoom Lizard and pulled it through the scattered grass.
There was plenty of bait in the form of yellow perch on this spot, and before too long I felt a thud on the lizard and set the hook. It was a nice-sized smallmouth bass that came up and jumped off the hook. No matter, I saw plenty of him, and he was solid, maybe 3 1/2 pounds. Another bite, and another good smallie would jump off the hook. Scott next set on a small keeper on the rig, but that would be it for this area.
We moved a few hundred yards to see if an old milfoil patch was still there, and, indeed, it was. I flipped a watermelon Brush Hog into the thick weeds and pulled out a nice 2 ¾-pound largemouth. We moved on, plodding through 3- to 4-foot waves, and checked a few old, familiar spots. Not much was going on. I cast a gold Long A Bomber jerkbait and ripped it through the breaking waves along a weedline in 12 to 14 feet of water. A few 2-pound smallmouths would chase the jerkbait, but I didn’t see the packs of fish that I was hoping to.
We graphed some ledges in 30 to 35 feet of water and saw a few arches, but it was really too rough to drop the trolling motor and try to catch them. So we moved on to a protected side of one of the nearby islands and threw jigs and spinnerbaits to the outside weed edge. The bite was slow, but I did manage to pick up a solid 4-pound smallmouth on the football jig and, shortly after, a 3 1/2-pound smallie on the jerkbait.
There were very few boats around, probably due to the rough conditions, but it was really hard to get any solid practice in when the lake was like that. So we put the boat back on the trailer and headed north to relaunch the boat up in Missisquoi Bay. It was now late afternoon, and the wind was still cranking at 20 to 25 mph, but I really wanted to check some of the shallow lilies and reeds where I had caught the largemouth during prepractice.
The parking lot was full of bass-boat trailers even though it was late in the day. It was clear that this part of the lake would get a lot of pressure, and there were a lot of guys that figured they could get somewhat out of the wind up here. It still hadn’t rained much, and the lake level was falling at the rate of an inch a day. It was down another foot since my practice 10 days before.
My trolling motor batteries were dying, and the wind was brutal, but I hung in there long enough to check some of the better areas that I had previously located. The shallow reeds and brush were now high and dry, and the falling water had repositioned most of the bass, but I still frogged up a couple of 3 1/2-pound largemouths along one of my better stretches of reeds.
I spent the remainder of the day up the river, mostly looking at the cover and driving for several miles up toward the dam. I didn’t fish much, mostly just looking. There were lots of boats up there. It was getting dark as we drove out of the river and put the boat back on the trailer. We picked up some groceries and headed for New York, where we would check into our cabin at Marine Village, which is just north of Plattsburg, right on the lake.
Sept. 6
The second official practice day would be cloudy and drizzly with a strong northwest wind. I decided that it would be a good day to trailer down south about 40 miles and explore the mid-lower section of Lake Champlain. The run from Plattsburg would have been brutal through the widest section of the lake, and it would have been expensive, too, from a boat-gas perspective.
We trailered down and found a launch near Willsboro, N.Y. We were the only boat in the parking lot again as we headed out toward the main lake. We graphed a bunch of smelt in one of the bays, but couldn’t find any smallmouths ambushing them.
Committed to checking some spots further south and on the Vermont side, we headed across the big section of the lake. We surfed through 4- to 5-foot rollers as we took our time crossing the lake. Once safely across, we headed south several more miles and then started working our way back. The thought process was to try to establish a smallmouth pattern in this underutilized section of Lake Champlain. I knew if I could get onto a good bite down here that I would have the fish all to myself, and any fish down here would be significantly less pressured and less lure-shy.
Rain and wind were the order of the day, and we got pelted off and on all day. The strong north winds would pound the exposed sections of the lake and force us into protected coves and pockets. Most of the day was uneventful, and we never really found a good concentration of bass. It occurred to me that this must be why nobody fished down here. There really wasn’t anywhere near the good cover that is available in the far north and far south sections of the lake.
Late in the afternoon, Scott and I happened upon a small bay that was full of yellow perch and had some scattered grass too. We burned spinnerbaits across the surface and had a good flurry of action that produced six or seven nice smallmouths. I punched in the waypoints, and we headed back across the lake to pull out.
We trailered back to our cabin, but still had an hour of light left, so we dumped the Ranger back into the water at a launch right near the cabin and fished until past dark. We drop-shotted a long tapering rocky point in 25 feet of water and had a ball catching 1 1/2- to 2-pound smallmouths. These were obviously not the right fish for the tournament, but it was fun to catch them, literally one after the other.
It was another long and punishing day on the water, and we really didn’t have much to show for it. I had just the one spot way down south, and it would be a huge gamble to run down that far without good backup water nearby. So I figured I would spend the remaining two days north of Plattsburg, looking for concentrations of smallmouth bass.
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Editor’s note: Stay tuned for Part 3 of Andrews’ adventure on Lake Champlain in which he’ll write about his official practice period.
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