Fishing Cave Run Lake and Licking River with my buddy, Scott, for the Memorial Bass Tournament

I fished the Friends of Cave Run Memorial Bass Tournament for the third year with my buddy, Scott, and his beautiful Ranger boat. This tournament raises money for scholarships to Morehead University for the counites surrounding the lake, so it is a lot of fun and for a good cause! All of the teams fish on Saturday, and then the top 20 teams qualify to fish on Sunday for the $10,000 first prize, but unfortunately our day didn't go as we hoped, and we didn't qualify. We tried so hard to find the fish, but every spot we had picked out on the main lake in pre-fishing had boats on it, so we headed up the river to try to find fresh water. We ended up catching a lot of small fish, but never found the bigger ones to get over the 13"-16" slot limit for largemouth bass, and most of the people who qualified for Sunday had at least one "over" fish in their bag. In pre-fishing, I got on a great topwater bite until the sun fully hit the water, so I started the tournament day with topwater rigged on 3 rods. Well, tournament morning was foggy, and we were delayed blasting off until after 7:30 and full sun, so we missed the morning topwater bite, and I got to start by retying half my rods at the first stop we make. Frustrating and disappointing, but I've gotten a lot better at finesse fishing since last year, so I had high hopes that I would be able to finesse up some bass for the team, but nothing I tried worked and I ended up only contributing some "unders" to the team bag. The biggest bass we found for the day was a chunky 15.75" Scott caught that was unfortunately in that protected slot limit and had to be released.

This is such a fun tournament for me, the only one I've ever done on a bass boat, and I rarely get the opportunity to fish the "team" format that I love... I really enjoy battling together on a team with a good friend! The flip side of that is how bad I feel when I don't do well for my partner, it is painful to let a friend down! But Scott knows we both tried our hardest, and we will be back next year!

Thanks to the organizers of the tournament for hosting such a great weekend!

Thanks to Strictly Sail & Kayak for being such great supporters of the kayaking, sailing, and angling communities!

Thanks to Scott for inviting me to partner with him!