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Istokpoga gives up some nice fish.
by: Michael Guiles 4/22/2012

The first tournament of our season was last weekend on Lake Istokpoga. As usual the wind was up and made for some bumpy if not wet riding. The fishing was good on Friday pre-fishing we found a pattern that worked for us, finding fish every place we tried it. The bite seemed to be better after 10 am, when the fished moved up to the reeds. Throwing a senko or flipping an ugly otter worked well.

When we went out Saturday, the first day of our two day tourny, it was a slight chop but no white caps. The pattern we discovered on Friday was working, by 11 am we were culling the smaller fish and were on our way to a really good day. Everyone seemed to have a really good day of fishing out of 21 teams there were 20 with limits of 5 fish each, only one boat had a single fish. That is 101 fish for 21 boats, not a usual tournament by any means. The first place team had a weight of 24 pounds and had to release two fish they caught that were over 22 inches because they had already caught two in that slot.

Sundays start was pretty much the same with a smaller chop than Saturday. Mainly because the wind had shifted more to the south instead of out of the east. The other thing that changed was the sun now shining brightly, the two days before were overcast for most of the day. For some reason this made quite a change to the pattern we were fishing. I think the fish moved way back into the reeds to get out of the sun, making it much harder to fish in the wind. The result for everyone changed, this time there were only 14 limits and the total fish count was 77 for the 21 boats. The same team finished at the top for the second day having five fish weighing in at 25 pounds. It helped when two of the fish had a combined weight of 16 plus pounds (picture below),

Lake Istokpoga gave up several fish over the six pound range. See the pictures below for some of them.

Blog content © Michael Guiles