April 27, Potomac River, Final Day
Dan writes:
All right, this is it. I’m in sixth place going in to the final day. Am I nervous? No, surprisingly calm. Can I win this thing? It’s possible, but doubtful. The leader has 6 1/2 pounds over me. Had I caught those two I broke off yesterday, now that would be a different story, but today I feel that I’m fishing for second place. And that would be just fine with me – I’d be very happy with that.
The other reason I’m feeling calm today is that I have absolutely no decisions to make today. After the success I’ve had on that one hundred-yard stretch over the previous two days, I am committing to it for all eight hours today. I’m going to live or die on that spot, and I’m going to do it fishing the magic Terminator jig and the crankbait that my partner gave me yesterday.
So we took off today, with the camera boat and spectators tagging along, with the exact same gameplan as yesterday and the day before. Race up to the lighthouse. If there’s someone there, keep on going; otherwise, stop in and see if we can catch a few quick ones. As we round a bend fifteen minutes north of takeoff, the lighthouse comes into view. It is still miles ahead though, and we stare at it the entire time as we approach, trying to discern whether or not there is a boat sitting on it. Eventually it becomes obvious that there is not just one boat, but more than that. In fact, there is a camera boat, and probably spectators, too. It’s one of the top five guys, but I don’t know which one.
I race on by and sit down on my honey hole. Joe is already there camped out on his spot just above me. I found out last night that they took five that weighed seventeen pounds off of that spot yesterday. Coincidentally, we took five that weighed seventeen pounds off of my spot. Let’s just pray that there’s one more day’s worth of fish left.
Right off the bat though, I got the feeling that it was going to be different today. I caught a short fish quickly on the crankbait, and my partner caught one out of the grass, but after that we fished for over an hour without any bites at all. Finally, I got a jig bite and put a nice fish in the boat, but no matter how sweetly I talked to it, it just wasn’t going to stretch out and touch that fifteen-inch line.
At eleven o’clock I did put a keeper in the livewell. This gave us a little hope that the fish had just been waiting for the tide to get right, but it was a false hope. Nothing else happened. Eventually I wandered all the way up to Joe, to ask how they were doing. They had caught fifteen or twenty short fish, but only one keeper.
As I was hooking up the boat early this morning, long before the first light of day, I had spent a few moments looking at the moon. Big and round and full. As we were racing upriver this morning, I remember saying to myself how beautiful it was seeing the sun rise above the horizon on my right, with the full moon setting down on my left. Here’s what I think was happening this week: These fish, these beautiful, fat fish that I had been catching now for three days, were moving up out of the river channel and getting ready to spawn. They were staging on these shallow rocks for a couple of days, and the full moon last night just triggered them to move on around the corner to do their thing.
At the end of the day I weighed in just the one fish. I fell to nineteenth place in the final standings. Overall though, I’m still very happy with my performance this week, with all the media attention, and with just knowing that I was really close this time. We’ll be driving home from this tournament feeling good about ourselves, and really, really looking forward to coming back.
And one final thing. Remember how I talked about having found the winning fish in practice in two different tournaments already this year, and then not going to fish for them on tournament day? Well guess where this tournament was won. At the lighthouse.