Thursday, December 6
B.A.S.S. Open, St. John’s River, Day One
The first part of the morning was pretty uneventful. I met my partner, we waited for our boat number to be called, and we ran the 15 miles down to the Rodman lock. After locking through we ran another five miles to our first fishing spot, but when we shut the engine down my partner said “Uh oh, that doesn’t sound good!” He tried to crank the motor again, but he’d just blown the power head. That left us twenty miles from the weigh-in, with nothing but a trolling motor.
My partner of course felt awful about the situation, and was very apologetic. It wasn’t his fault though, and in fact the situation could have been much worse. We weren’t out in the middle of a lake somewhere with no help in sight, instead we were right where we had intended to start fishing, and within easy trolling distance of a launch ramp. If we caught some fish, we could leave the boat this afternoon at the ramp, return to the weigh-in in somebody else’s boat, and then return with the truck to retrieve the disabled boat.
So that is exactly what we did. We called the tournament director to let him know the situation, and then started fishing. As it was in practice though the fishing today was tough, and with a blown motor we couldn’t move to another spot when the fish here wouldn’t bite. We spent all day on this one stretch, trying every bait in the box, but caught only one fish all day. At 1:00 we bummed a ride with another competitor (Mike Iaconelli) back to the weigh-in, picked up the truck and returned to the launch ramp for the boat.
Fishing was tough for everyone today, and the cut for a check (55th place) is only five and a half pounds.