Peter Larmand Journal Entries
Ottawa River , July 21 & 22/07
This year Renegade Bass decided to put back to back tournaments on the mighty Ottawa River. This is a very important weekend because having a bad tournament or 2 here on this body of water will more than likely eliminate your chances from qualifying for the classic.
Spent 3 days pre fishing for this weekend and they were very productive eliminating lots of unproductive water. Our biggest challenge was finding fish. I haven’ t spent a lot of time fishing on the Ottawa River before. The last time that I was fishing the Ottawa River was back in 1988 for an Ottawa Bass Tournament. So needless to say that this was a challenge for us but we were surprised the challenge that it turned out to be.
The Friday before we had severe rains and it turned the river into chocolate milk coloured water. So we knew that we had our work cut out for us. Although we were confident in our spots that we found in pre fish, we headed out. We got to our first spot and we started throwing top water, buzz baits and moon talker to be exact. Our second cast in, Darrell get a boil on his buzz bait. He immediately throws back in and it hits it again. This time it’s on, he gets it to the boat and in the net. We put it in the live well and we both look at each other because this bass is over 5 lbs. We start thinking to ourselves that this is going to be a great day. So back we go to try and catch our limit. Normally, we catch our limit but we always have a hard time finding that kicker to go with it. Well, this time we got the kicker, let’s just go and get the limit.
Our second fish, not as big comes at 2:00. We said that this couldn’t be happening. What is going wrong? We decide to run to some of our other spots on the river that we caught fish on but no luck. The main river was so murky, that it was difficult to find fish.
We come to the weighin with only 3 fish. A very disappointing day but we know that we still have that monster that we caught first thing. Darrell goes up to the scale and it weighed in at 6.50 lbs. Good enough for big fish of the tournament. Although we were disappointed in the outcome because now we know that we are behind the 8 ball. Having a bad opening tournament and now this one, we knew that stop number 3 was very important for us. Stop number 3 being the same body of water and the very next day.
Stop number 3, the water conditions haven’t changed, so there we were faced with the same thing. We decide to go back to the bay that we caught our fish yesterday. Making some more changes with our baits and or approach to fishing on that day, we were hoping that it would make the difference. As it turned out, we were only able to bring in 1 fish to the scale.
This was a very disappointing weekend but it was a very educational one. I am actually looking forward to fishing in those same types of conditions again and putting forth the new knowledge that I picked up from this experience. The fish were there, we just didn’t fish our spots methodically and that is the reason why our results were they way they were.
All we could do now was to go out and fish and have some fun. With the results from these 2 tournaments, we knew that there was no way that we could qualify for the classic. The next stop was on another body of water that I have never been on and that was Lake St. Francis.
