Champion's Recap - West Rush Lake By: Jacob Stolquist

It had been years since I last fished the lake and didn't remember much about it. It was very interesting to come back to a lake and check points saved on Navionics with the help of livescope. It was amazing to see the quantity of fish in this lake.

The weekend before the tournament we made it out for a day of scouting to try and relearn the lake. It ended up being a great bite and we found quality fish in the South Bay. We were anxious for tournament day to come even though we knew there was a chance things would change with the cold weather coming. We kept an eye on weather all week and thought our spot still might be good. Friday we took a vacation day and pre-fished again. This time everything would change. Every time we would drill a hole the fish would be 40’ away. We were constantly chasing and we’re always two steps behind by the time we dropped a line. It took some time to figure out that these fish were just to skittish.

Saturday after a cold day of fishing we could already feel the affects it was taking on us but we had to come up with a new game plan. In the two times out scouting we realized the main food source seemed to be minnows. The crappies would be high suspended lines chasing bait balls around. Sunfish also seemed to be in many of the same locations. With the slight pressure change our thoughts were that the deeper fish would allow for us to get over top of them and not spook. We were not finding much weeds and when they did they didn’t seem to hold fish. With that information we decided to break the lake down all over looking for new spots.

Our magic depth seemed to be 27’ and it eliminated a lot of water. When we did this it made the lake more manageable. We moved most the way north and started finding fish at almost every spot. We would work our way south and as we did the fish seemed to get bigger. We finally came across a spot that we caught a decent average. This is what we were looking for.

We knew there were larger fish in the South Bay but felt we would waste a lot of time trying to keep up with them. The deep crappies allowed for us to get right on top of them and pull 4-5 fish out of a school before you would have to drill a new hole.  We found the school towards the end of the day Saturday so we knew it would be a bit of a risk to find them again Sunday since basin crappies like to roam. We decided to go with this spot because we felt we seen enough 10” average that there had to be bigger fish mixed in.

The next day was tournament day. It was colder than the day prior but the wind was a lot less. The cold didn’t allow for one of our wheelers to start so we had to condense our gear down to one atv and one sled. This was the start of a lot of things going wrong. After getting to our spot we began the search for fish and found some just shifted off our spot a little bit. The fishing was great given the conditions.

Our heater broke in the sled so we did not have heat. This made for a very challenging day. Normally when it is this cold we had a shack with to run the heater and leave our fish in the shack to keep from freezing. We spent a lot of time tending to our fish. Constantly changing water and keeping the slush out of the bucket so it would not ice over.

As far as the rest of the day we spent most of the day fishing in one spot. We sifted through crappies finally catching four 11” crappies and four 10.5” crappies and our gills were 7.5"- 8”. We were happy with our crappies but knew our gills were in trouble.

With two hours left we decided to drive north and check a couple spots to try and upgrade our sunfish. We ended up catching a couple sunfish but they also were small. Our bag we had at noon was the bag we ended up turning in. We got back to weigh in with a sense of hope and relief to be done fishing for the weekend.

I personally have always been one to try to embrace the struggle. Work hard and it makes the reward so much more worth it. The days prior to the tournament were a huge struggle and very tough days to be out there but we learned the most information we could have out of it. It gave us a better plan going into tournament day and how to face the new set of challenges we knew would come our way.