On day one we had some wild weather.  I am pre fishing with my 14 year old son, Christopher who is off of school for a week.  At one point, we had an absolute squall come through the area we were fishing.  Thunder and lightening, it was the whole deal.  We pulled into a cove and put the boat onto the shore, at about the same time, Alton Jones pulled in and did the same thing, you don't want to be on the water with lightening in the neighborhood, it's that whole, highest object gets struck thing that we wanted to avoid.  It proceeded to hail "peanut size hail," on us.   My entire cock-pit was full of hail, the boat, was just loaded with it.

We caught five keepers today, all on reaction lures, rattle traps and jerkbaits.  It seems like I can't get bit on the good looking stuff, but as soon as I come up to a dull looking stretch, I catch one, go figure.

More of the same today, only four bites, but the weather was gorgeous.  Bright, clear and in the 70's, hey I fished in my short pants and sandles.

I am going to need to find more in order to have a good tournament, I am just going to keep casting that rattle trap, cover water and see what I can find.

I bet I caught 30 keepers today, I fished a jerk bait just about the entire day.  It was bright, clear and in the 70's today, the fish that I am on are feeding heavily on shad, but I had to go through 30 to get four.  Understand that when I say I caught 30 fish, these were not 10 and 11" dinks, these were big, beautiful 14 7/8" keepers in every other state we fish in, but here they have to be 15."  That means, every fish you catch, you think yes, this one has got to be a keeper, only to be frustrated when they don't measure.  And fat, some of these fish would make a football blush.  I had to release a 2-11 today!  Two pounds, eleven ounces because it was a nano-meter short.  I even left that one in the livewell for a while, hoping it might barf a few shad out, get skinnier and flatten out, that's how close it was.  That fish would have put me over 16 pounds.

It is clear to me that the guys who are up there on the leaderboard, were the ones who went for only five bites.  You could sit off shore and slow roll a spinner bait, or crawl a jig.  You wouldn't get many bites doing that but they would be big, they were big.  Still, I don't know if you could do that two days in a row.

I am throwing that jerk bait, and will probably do that again today.  I sure would like to get five keepers early, then I would back off the grass flats and slow roll a spinner bait.

I guess I couldn't have had a worse day and lived through it.  Some things just defy all logic.  Today, I got on my water and began fishing, throwing rip baits and rattle traps.  My water was about 15 miles North of the ramp.  I caught my first fish, a little after getting there, and felt that I would be OK.  I decided to make a run to another area and when I put the trolling motor down, (lock down position-for the run I was going to make,) my trolling motor cable broke.  In 11 years of tournament fishing, heck in all of my years of bass fishing, I have never broke a trolling motor cable.  I ran back to the launch ramp to put my back up trolling motor on the boat.

When you have a back up trolling motor, not only does it take up space in your vehicle, but you can start to wonder why you lug this thing around with you.  Now I know why I do.  The fun doesn't stop here.  Right out of the box, trolling motors need to have the proper plug installed because different wiring systems require different plugs.  I had to cut the plug off my original trolling motor and splice on to the new one, that took time.

After losing about and hour and half of fishing, I was back on the water.  I wanted to run North to a place where I caught a ton of fish during pre fish, they weren't all keepers, but the numbers there made me feel that I could weed through the shorts, (which weigh two pounds at this lake.)  I arrived and began fishing when I again broke the cable in my back up trolling motor.  #$%#$@!  If I had put the new cable in myself, I would have suspected that I screwed up installing the new cable, but this was a brand new trolling motor, right out of the box.  All of those years without breaking a trolling motor cable and I break two in one hour.  What's next, being struck by lightening?

I ran all of the way back to the service area and was able to my cable fixed, but I lost another hour and half of fishing.  By this time, I was so messed up mentally that I didn't make the adjustment that I knew I should have made.  In this tournament, I fished too deep.  I targeted the 5-6 foot depth range and in reality the fish were much shallower.  Guys reported catching good fish in water that 2 feet to 6" deep.  Safe to say this is about as frustrating an experience as I have had on the tour.