OR mouth
Nancy and I fished the Rock the Dock tournament out of Rock Landing this weekend.
The past few tournaments in the area have been cancelled due to the weather. The pent up demand of boats wanting to fish may have contributed to the record turn out of over 350 entrants for the tournament.
The organizers and volunteers were very pleased with the tourney results and they did a great job of running the tournament.
We decided to go for broke and fish the area we know best and that is the mouth of the Ochlockonee River. We knew that the tournament winning fish were swimming there, all you have to do is catch them.
Saturday, we hit the river a daylight hoping to catch some topwater fish on the incoming tide.
I did manage to catch a 3 plus trout on a badonk a donk and lost a toad on the next cast. We scrounged up a few keeper trout, but nothing to get excited about in the morning.
We came back in and got lunch, walked the dog and took a nap and headed back out in the afternoon.
The afternoon bite was tough until we decided to drag a few shrimp on a carolina rig around the bars.
We hit our the white bar where Willie had caught his 5 lb. trout earlier in the year. We always have a lot of confidence when we roll up there, but we had fished it earlier with nothing to show. This time it was different.
I was first in the water and first on the board with this quick fish blowout.
Nancy tossed in and I watched her rod tip pull down and she set the hook. After a heck of a battle she landed this trout which is the largest ever caught by the Fish Hard Panacea fishing team.
The fish weighed 5.45 lbs. on the Rock the Dock Tourney scales and placed her fourth, just out of the money. Big trout for the 2 day tournament was 5.8 lbs.
After some pictures were taken she threw out and again her rod tip went down as soon as the shrimp entered the water and hit the bottom. After another battle in the swift water she pulled in this nice 22" redfish.
I finally got my rig back in the water after all of her fish catching and managed this beauty. Don't ask me what it is.
We started catching trash fish and decided to head in and get prepared for the next day.
We figured that we knew how to catch them now and would even catch bigger fish on Sunday.
We again hit the water at the break of day and proceeded to go fish less except for one small redfish. Who would have thought.
We headed back in to weigh Nancy's nice trout and she was in third place at the time.
We came back to the award ceremony and found she had fell off the board.
But we did see some big fish weighed in.
Our friend Blake went king fishing and came in second. His fish was shark bitten while getting it to the boat. You figure out if he would have won. Here is his fish next to the winning kingfish which weighed 40 plus lbs.
The largest fish was an 88 lb. Amberjack.
Check this thing out!
Nancy didn't win anything, but they knew she showed up!
