Last Cast Tournament - Honeoye Lake - Novemberr 23

Today was the first of two Last Cast tournaments I put on in the late Fall. This one today was on Honeoye Lake, next week on Conesus Lake.

Coming off a day like yesterday on Erie, and heading to "puny fishville" like Honeoye was going to be tough, but with the weather as great as is was supposed to be, how could it not be good just to be out there.

Air was relatively warm, with nearly zero wind first thing in the morning. Water temp was 44 degrees. I had 8 boats show up this morning, which is great considering 3 or 4 "regulars" were not there. After sending off all the other boats, I ripped down the lake to my usual smallie stretch. With the wind as calm as it was, I decided NOT to start with the tube, and grabbed the blade bait Rob let me borrow yesterday. About 12 jerks later I put the first fish in the boat, about 2 1/4 pound smallie. Hmmmm... there might be something to these things. A few minutes later, a decent keeper largemouth came on the blade. And within a half hour I put the largest fish of the day in the boat for us, a smallie a little over 3 pounds, again, on the blade. All my Last Cast's are 3 fish limits, so there we had it, a quick limit in the boat.

About that time, the wind picked up a little, and out came the tubes. A couple drifts over the area and I put another smallie close to 3 pounds in the boat, and both of us caught several fish in the 2 pound class. I even broke out the blade once and awhile, and put a 2 1/4 pound largemouth in the boat on that. My partner Jim was having a great time, not having much of any fishing experience after the first of October. About 10:00, the last cull fish ended up in the well, another smallie about 2 3/4 pounds. A couple hours went by whereby the fishing was very tough, but by noon, it had picked right back up again. A couple more smallies were put in the boat that challenged our smallest, but the balance beam proved they weren't quite big enough. Many more fish in the 2 pound class were caught as well. We narrowed down our drift to catching ALL our fish in two seperate spots, each about the size of a two car garage. I tried repeatedly to go against the wind, and really work these small areas with tubes and blades, but not a single fish was caught this way. We really had to be drifting over the area to catch fish.

With 20 minutes left, we travelled about halfway back to the ramp and stopped in an area that just "looked good". In 10 minutes we caught two more nice smallies, and lost another. We had caught over 20 fish for the day, and they averaged about 2 pounds. Only 2 largemouth were caught, and the rest were smallies. On to the the weigh-in!

After everyone was on the trailers, it became evident others didn't fair as well. Small largemouth were the order of the day, and no one else had more than one smallmouth in their bags. We ended up winning with 8.7 pounds for our 3 fish. Ed and Todd Weber took second with 6.8 pounds, and also had a lunker largemouth at 3.8 pounds.

Results can be found at: http://www.wnybass.com/lastcast/honeoye_2003/index.html

On to Conesus next week!!