2nd place Rock-n-Reel Tournament 6/20/09 -to- 6/21/09

We decided to enter the Rock-n-Reel fishing tournament this weekend our selfs.  The tournament this year fell on Father's Day so Josh and I thought how better to spend it then with both our fathers fishing with us.  We got together my Father, Capt. Peter Hoogs and Josh's Father, Duayne Bunch (our angler) to join us for the weekend.  We have been fishing pretty well so I wasn't worried betting on our selfs, knowing we had a good chance to win our money back.  

Saturday morning started off slow but by the 10:00 round up we started to see our action.  Shortly after missing a little one on the short bait, I spotted a feeder on the surface.  As soon as I got near it, the small blue grabbed our short bait.  Duane made short work of the little blue to get us on the board with one tag.  10 minutes after getting the lures back in the water we hooked our second blue and successfully tagged and released it.  Now were leading the tournament with two tags.  We then preceded to raise three more blues, one of which looked every bit of 500 lbs.  We also tagged another blue after stop fishing to give us three tagged blues for the day.  Unfortunately our lead slipped away to the FIVE STAR releasing four blues for the day.   

Sunday morning we knew we had some catching up to do, we missed one early then hooked our first blue around 10:30 a.m.  We got it all the way to leader reaching out to tag it the fish shook of the hook making it not count as a release.  Fishing the same grounds as we did the day before we weren't seeing the same results.  By 1:00 p.m. I knew the fish had moved to another area, so I went looking.  It payed off, about 2 miles south of where we were working all morning signs of life started to show again.  We tagged two more blues that afternoon to lock us in second place with four tags, and to win over $9,000.