What a week of fishing in Wilson! We arrived Thursday the 7th and settled into our house with the rest of our tournament team. On Friday May 8th Dad, Jay, Gump and I headed out to pre-fish the Scotty King of the Lake tournament and man did we find fish! We only fished for 6 hours or so but we pulled 25 big Kings out of the lake and we were psyched to get back out there for Day 1 of the tournament. I'll tell you more about what we were running later, but here's a picture that pretty much sums up the day on Friday...the guys hooked up with another big King!

We weighed a King in for Big Fish Friday and ended up with the 6th
biggest fish of the day at just over 20 lbs. We had a deep water
program figured out and we ended up fishing that for the rest of the
week.

Here's a few shots of the Shotgun Start on Saturday morning:


On Saturday (first day of the tournament) we went back out to our waypoints from the day before and set up and settled into a steady pick of decent sized fish. Matt Siggeman from Sigg's Rigs joined us for the tournament and he got to see first-hand just how well his flies work on Lake Ontario Kings. We didn't have them going as fast and furious as we did on Friday, but we still managed to round out a very nice box of fish (we took 8 in the last 45 minutes we were fishing) and we headed to the scales feeling like we probably had a top 10 box.

Here's a couple of shots of the guys working the back of the boat. Notice the Sissy belt that we bought for Jay. I guess these big Kings are just too much for him! LOL!! I'm gonna paint the thing pink before he puts that back on again!



The Scotty is different from the Pro-Am's in that you only weigh in
your 5 biggest fish. We had a couple of high-teens Kings mixed in with
some 14-15 lb Kings so we felt like we were at least in it for Day 2.
As we watched each boat weigh in, we began to see that we had a pretty
good box and when the weigh in was all over with we were sitting in
first place
with an 80 lb box of fish! WOW! What a great feeling to be leading 66
other boats. The forecast was
for Gale Force winds overnight and we were hoping that the forecast
would hold true and give us the win. Talk about a sleepless Saturday night. I was up almost all night long listening to that wind just hoping that it was blowing hard enough that the tournament committee would cancel Sunday and we could sneak out of there with the big check!
When we woke up Sunday morning it was blowing but not as hard as we had all hoped; it looked to me like we were going to have to fish again and try to hold onto our lead. After the tournament committee went out to look at the lake they decided that it was time to fish, so out we went in some nasty wind & waves.


We gave it our best shot in some pretty tough conditions and managed another respectable box of fish, but we just didn't have the 20lb fish mixed in there like we did on Saturday. Time to hope the other boats didn't find them either!


We were the last boat to weigh in on Sunday. They weigh in reverse order from Saturday's results so the tension was building all throughout Sunday's weigh-in! We knew we had a good box of fish, but we also knew that there were a few other boats with even bigger boxes than we had on Saturday, so by the time we got to the stage we pretty much knew the lead was slipping away from us.

When it was all said and done our 68 lb box landed us in 4th place. Congratulations to Joe Toomey and his Irish Thunder team for taking the win. I should also mention that my friends on Cold Steel came in with a
huge 92 lb box on Sunday that put them in 2nd place overall. Way to go guys! Here's the final results.

Our program was primarily a Spin Dr./Sigg's Rigs fly set-up. Wire divers out 375' and 425' on a .5 setting pulling White Spinnys/Sigg's Glow Ghost flies and Wonderbread Spinnys/Sigg's UV Wonderbread flies were the best set-ups we had in the water. Higher divers set on a 2.5 out 300' and 325' pulling Dalmatian Spinnys/Siggs Blue Dolphin flies and White Spinnys/Siggs Green Hypnotist flies also did their fair share of the work. We had a deep rigger parked at 150' all weekend pulling another Wonderbread combo, and our higher rigger set at 110' was pulling a variety of NK & DW spoons. 500 and 600 coppers also got bit multiple times pulling Green Double Crush Glow Spinnys/Sigg's Green Hypnotist Flies. Best down speed for us all weekend was 2.1-2.2 mph and we caught most of our bigger fish away from the pack.
We had a great time together and I'm glad that the fish cooperated for us all weekend long. More reports from the rest of our week in Wilson to come.
Until Next Time,
Fish On!!
~Capt. Bill