A Busy Weekend - by Tony Dahlberg
Green lake to Kyle and I is as foreign as Paris, France. Fortunately, it is not an enormous body of water and has very simple structure, so it isn’t difficult to break down. Unfortunately, Kyle and I never actually got a chance to pre-fish out there together. As usual we shared screenshot after screenshot of our prospective spots and talked strategy for a few days. He was able to spend a full day, a week prior to the event, and hit every spot we pinned. The consensus was that there are lots of, little fish, finicky fish, and fast moving schools.
My mind was full of ideas and plans but a lot of that was focused on the MN Made Outdoors x Hometown Hero Outdoors Veterans and Law Enforcement panfish tournament being hosted on what would normally be pre-fishing day. I had plans to check spots early before the event started Saturday but as you can imagine that didn’t happen. I truly didn’t care, I was so excited to get these guys and gals out on the ice for an epic day. And epic it’s was! All of the teams were working the spot and staying mobile as a tournament angler does because the key to the crappies, was locating the school and dropping your jig right in front of them before they moved on. You could practically see the schools on top of the ice by how the teams chased them down every time a panoptix update was shouted out. It would have been cool to see a time lapse from a drone of this scene.
The event was sponsored by so many amazing companies I don’t want to list them all here. Head over the the MN Made Facebook page for all of the awesome sponsor highlights. The event finished out and teams started closing in around the weigh in tent to see how they stacked up. Traeger had setup the ultimate spread with about 5 grills cooking up and unreal lunch on the ice for everyone. This event to me showed that even though we are competing against each other all season long, when it all comes down to it, everyone is out there for the love of this sport and wants to share it with anyone that’s interested! Thanks to everyone involved with setting up this amazing event and I can’t wait to see what next year is all about.
On to tournament day...we arrived bright eyed and bushy tailed with high hopes of filling a decent bag. Kyle and I decided on a plan that would involve grinding it out for 7 sunfish first thing in the morning then moving out a few hundred yards to chase down some slabs. Grind it out we did, Kyle struggled all morning to ice a bucket sunny and I wasn’t doing much better. 11am rolled around and I had kept 6 decent sunnies and I was frustrated, until Kyle finally landed that 7th gill. No time was wasted because we really didn’t have much.
Kyle pinned our Crappie spot and we soon found out it’s good that he did. The school was moving, but in a very small area on the spot. You could call it the spot on the spot I guess (shout out IDO). As predicted early in the day, Kyle was the crappie king and was loading up our bucket with 10” crappies. I contributed a couple smaller bucket fish that were eventually upgraded by one of Kyle’s tanks. Sitting on top of a school of crappies is hands down my favorite thing to do and when they are biting hard, as most of these were, it makes having fun really easy. 1pm came and we had caught enough good fish to feel pretty comfortable with our crappies. We attempted to revisited the gills and upgrade some smaller fish. Two upgrades later, time was expiring and my locator had died.
Weigh-in was, as it usually is full, of himming and hawing about how the big bites were tough to come by and the mediocrity of the bag we were about to weigh. Anglers in this league tend to under estimate the quality of their fish, and that’s because the quality of the teams we are competing against. All said and done we finished in 12th with 6.21# which was much better than we expected. Nick and Leif weighed the only bag over 7 coming in at 7.54# and all but locked up the Team of the Year title for 2020. Some new faces graced the top of the list with the Olstad brothers in second and Squeaks and Dylan in third.
We are in 4th overall coming into the final event which is going to be a fun one on Mazaska. Our only hope for TOTY is the three teams ahead of us all coming down with a flu that keeps them off the ice for the day...Nick would still find a way to win I’m sure. As always tune in for the live weigh in at 2pm on Feb 23rd and watch this season come to an end with what could potentially be an all time record bag from more than one team.
Prediction is....13.26# wins the final event!!
Tony “ReelToneD” Dahlberg 😂