Living the Dream: Lake Champlain, Part 4
Dave Andrews details official off-limits day on Lake Champlain for FLW Series competition
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Editor’s note: This is the fourth 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, Part 2 and Part 3)(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 off-limits day
Sept. 9
Tuesday was a scheduled off day. FLW Outdoors builds this day into the schedule to allow anglers time to work on tackle, get their boats fixed and to have a registration meeting at a reasonable time during the day. For me, it was far from an “off” day.
Exhausted from several long days on the water and averaging roughly four hours of sleep a night, I was thrilled to sleep in a little that morning. At 6 a.m., I couldn’t lie in bed any longer and awoke to check the weather. NOAA weather had predicted severe thunderstorms, hail and winds of up to 40 mph. Lake Champlain featured a Lake Boating Advisory, which usually means that FLW won’t send the anglers out. Since it wasn’t a tournament day, it really didn’t matter, but I was still curious to see what all the fuss was about.
As dawn broke over Lake Champlain, the winds were still and the morning was mild and, boy, did it look like a great day to go fishing! A small thunderstorm rolled in around 7:30 a.m. and it rained off and on all morning, but the wind never did pick up, and the lake stayed nearly flat for most of the day.
Scott and I worked on tackle for about three hours in the morning. I spooled fresh Gamma on all my rods and changed hooks on my hard baits. I had completed most of my prep work when we took off for the Ranger Boats service trailer to have them look into my electronics problem. Scott thought my transducer had torn loose in the bottom of the boat during one of the bone-jarring runs the final day of practice. It appeared that the shoot-through transducer was still securely epoxied in the bilge area of the boat, but it was clear that something was wrong with the transducer. We dropped the boat off there and swung by Gus’ Diner in Plattsburg for the eggs-and-bacon breakfast I’d been craving all week. There were several anglers in there filling up, and we chatted with a few of the guys.
Late in the morning, the skies began to clear, and we headed off to look for a transducer for the Lowrance X-28. Gander Mountain had blown through all of their stock earlier in the week and Dick’s Sporting Goods was no help either. I made a few calls and eventually tracked down an old Massachusetts buddy, Jamie Worth, who was in town to fish the tournament. He had a spare, and we headed over to his motel to pick it up. Next it was back to the service trailer to drop off the transducer and have the crew epoxy it in. We left the service yard at around 1 p.m., registered and then went back to the cabin to finish up working on tackle.
At 4 p.m., we headed over to the Crete Civic Center for the briefing and pairings. This is where things started to go bad for me. First off, FLW passed out a map that had the buoys marked off for the Missisquoi Wildlife Refuge. The map showed which areas were part of the refuge and noted the two different kinds of “no trespassing” signs that were erected there. During the briefing, the tournament director announced that all of the refuge would be off limits to competitors. This sent shock waves through the auditorium, as neither FLW nor any other tournament organization had ever put all of the refuge off limits to competitors. Indeed, only two months prior to this event, a Stren Series event was held here, and the entire refuge was not off limits.
I have no idea where this ruling came from. I can only imagine that the poorly marked refuge area became such a headache to FLW staff that they simply decided to put the whole thing off limits. It essentially rendered this very fertile part of Lake Champlain virtually unfishable, as most of the good water up here was now off limits. I know that many, many anglers were taken by surprise and had wasted countless hours fishing in water that they could now not return to. For me, it was a disappointment as I had my best day of practice and was considering starting the tournament up there. It certainly made my decision to head south for smallmouths an easy one.
Still trying to digest the off-limits announcement, they started calling off boat numbers. Normally, I pray for an early number so that I have the best chance of getting to fish my best area on the first morning. Lake Champlain is different; I never get much of a morning bite on the lake, and now having to make a long run south, I would need as much of the afternoon as I could get to catch my fish and get back to Plattsburg. The field was nearly full at 190 boats, and just as soon as the tournament director started calling names, he announced mine as boat No. 7. I was in the first flight and due in at 2:30 p.m. My heart sank.
I met my co-angler out in the parking lot, and we briefly discussed the next day’s plan and decided to meet at 4:30 a.m., ahead of the 5 a.m. rush of anglers at the launch. My partner was Darren Izumi from Canada. A recent college graduate, Darren was traveling with his dad and fishing a few tournaments before settling into the working world. His dad, Bob, enjoys celebrity status as the Roland Martin of Canada, complete with his own TV show and magazine. I’d met Bob in Decatur, Ala., during the Wheeler Lake event as our boats were parked next to each other in the boat yard. I found Bob to be very down to earth and a supernice guy. I looked forward to fishing with his son, and I hoped I could put him (and me) on some nice smallmouth bass.
After the meeting, I headed back to the service yard to retrieve my boat. After hooking up the boat, I asked the crew how the job went, and they informed me that they hadn’t done it. They thought my problem might have been in the settings or filters in the unit itself. I knew this wasn’t the case, but it was starting to get dark, and it was clear that the transducer wasn’t going to get installed that night. It wasn’t a huge deal anyway, as I planned to fish pretty shallow and likely wouldn’t need the graph as much as I would if I was graphing bait and fishing deep.
The service crews do a great job for the anglers, and I’m very happy that Ranger and Yamaha continue to support the anglers on the trail, so I wasn’t really upset about it. Besides, my buddy Scott had a theory. He figured that a void had formed in the epoxy where the transducer was mounted in the bilge area of the boat. This void, or air pocket, would cause the signal to get very weak and would explain the intermittent problems I was having the final practice day. If his theory held, then I could literally add water to the bilge area and this would fill the air pocket and give me a decent sonar reading. As it turned out, adding water to the boat would not be necessary …
Late in the evening, back at the cabin, I worked on tackle until past dark. I never did find time for supper, but I was used to the “fisherman’s diet,” which calls for one meal a day, and my big breakfast had taken care of that. J.T. Kenney and his posse had the cabin right next to ours, and he had us constantly laughing with his stories from life on the road. A buddy from home, Joe Lucarelli, stopped by to discuss the fishing. He was catching fish deep, but didn’t have a great practice either. I wrapped things up around 9 p.m. and headed off to bed. The alarm was set for 3:45 a.m.
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Editor’s note: Stay tuned for Part 5 of Andrews’ adventure on Lake Champlain in which he’ll write about the beginning of his FLW Series tourney at Lake Champlain.
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