07-31-2014, 09:00 AM
I hadn&#39;t been on the water since my marathon weekend 2 weeks ago. Got to our 1st spot and for the 1st hour and a half nothing... Finally get a bite on my Shakey Head and immediately know its a good one! Fish stripped drag a number of times but we finally got her in the net and she was 6.5#. A good start... 5 minutes later dad is on the phone with a buddy of his and says &quot;hang on I got a bite&quot;... He sets the phone down and sets the hook and yells for the net and says its a stud. Get her in the net and she was just under 6#. We felt like we were in a race against the clock because we knew TVA was killing the water at midnight. Our next two fish were both under 3. We had 2.14# and 2.0#. At about 11 I set the hook on a decent fish on a jig... She jumps right at the boat and my jig flies out but she lands in the net! She was 3.72# to finish out our limit. About this time I get a text from JMax saying he had over 25# and now just had to work with them to keep them alive. Thanks for making me feel good about my start Jim! After midnight we moved around and fished a bunch of grass and could only manage to cull for ounces. We thought that we would be able to upgrade our 2 small fish come morning but that never materialized. We never caught a fish once the sun came up.<br /><br />I believe we finished out at 20.54 good enough for 11th and 1st out of the money. However Johnny at DJ&#39;s Marine Electronics gave away 2 Duckett Ghost rods to 1st out of the money! So we got a great prize!<br /><br />I also would like to personally thank Jeff Todd for coming out yesterday morning to test his Oxygen system for the release tanks. We only lost 3-4 fish after weigh in. There were over 250 fish weighed in. We also only had 5 dead fish weighed in by the anglers. Jeff also tested a number of the livewells to test the oxygen saturation levels. My livewell had the 2nd highest at 7.4. Brad Ferguson had the highest at 7.9. Brad just installed the Cool-well system in his which seemed to make a huge difference. Guys if you are struggling to keep your fish alive I would recommend looking into the Cool-Well system. For me all I did was add ice regularly, have my oxygenator system running and use flip clips. All of my fish were ready to go immediately and swam off quickly.<br /><br />Congrats to Steve and Daniel on the great bag and deserved win!