Our Tournament Director opened the fridge Friday night during our house dinner, and a few seconds later, shouted, “Who in the F*CK is marinating their plastics with teriyaki sauce?!” He had grabbed a Tupperware container from the fridge, expecting salsa— shook it, and indeed found a variety of soft plastics soaking in a mysterious brown liquid.
“Uhh… that’d be mine. And it’s not teriyaki. It’s some juice from Japan that I got about 6 months ago— its got enzymes or something. You’re supposed to soak your baits in it. Supposedly kills the smallmouth,” I said, quickly stopping the conversation after realizing how crazy I sounded.
“You’ve been marinating these baits for SIX months?...”
“Yeah....you know, I also wouldn’t open that container if I were you.”
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Our Havasu trip had started the day before, with me feeling a bit lethargic in the passenger seat, chasing the sunrise across the California desert going East on the 40. I drifted in and out of sleep to the hum of the Navigator, opening one eye to catch a glimpse of the vast desert, until we rolled down the Site Six launch ramp in Havasu a few hours later. I apologized to my boater for being the worse copilot in the history of coanglers.
We pre-fished in 103-degree heat for two days, focusing on eliminating dead water, but more importantly, trying to find patterns. A couple of bites hinted at potential, especially with the smallmouth on beds, and every bait I pulled from the Tupperware container got bit on its first cast. Usually I'm used to running into a few fish who hadn't locked in on beds and were experiencing lock jaw, but every single one that we saw on beds, ate the bait. We set the hook on a few, while letting most just spit the bait, knowing we probably wouldn't be able to target those during the tournament.
By Friday, we had even more confidence—averaging 17-pound bags, but after a small weather assessment that we did the night before, knew we’d need quality largemouths to win. Clouds and wind will kill a bed bite quickly. But, we had found a pattern during our pre-fish in the morning that we knew we could run further especially if cloud cover was expected.
Saturday brought wind and clouds, disrupting bed fishing, much like we expected. Luckily, our original morning pattern fishing the tules paid off with a 4.5-pounder before most boats even dropped their trolling motor, since we made a run close to the ramp.
We immediately pivoted from smallmouth to largemouth, targeting tule edges, and despite losing three good fish that we could've culled, we ended Day 1 with 15 pounds and sat in 4th. Those lost fish would've put us at 18 and in the lead, but there isn't crying over spilled milk.
Running on zero sleep Sunday thanks to extracurricular activities the night before, we launched for Day 2, and an hour in, I landed an almost 6-pounder — on one of my “teriyaki” baits from the fridge again.
Maybe the enzymes worked after all.
My co-angler did the heavy lifting after that, as we focused on bigger largemouth up river who had moved into staging positions right behind the smallmouth. While the majority of the weight of our bags during prefishing consisted sight fishing smallmouth, all 10 fish we weighed during the tournament were of the green variety. We ended up making some clutch culls a few moments after we knew we would have to make the trek back through shallow water from up river back to the ramp.
We knew that we would be in contention, but also knew there were a pair of teams that did well on Saturday. But, we edged out the 2nd place team by a pound. It was a hard earned win, for our club's first 2 day tournament.
