2009 A.W.W.T.

Fished with John Hiltz and Doug Esch in the 9th annual A.W.W.T. out of Toledo Beach Marina. The temperature this morning was in the upper 60s and when we quit fishing it was in the upper 80s. The wind was out of the Northwest less than 5 knots and there were no waves. The water temp is 78 degrees and in the area we were fishing there were some weeds floating on the water. It was so hot today that on one of the boats fishing in today's tournament, the crew went swimming before they came back to the marina. Most of the boats fishing went northeast of Sputnik about 4 miles and started trolling towards the International Buoy. After a couple hours of fishing we started to separate and the majority of the boats were between West Sister Island and Sputnik. We stayed by the International Buoy as did Starfish. The reports on the radio were that Serenity had some nice fish drifting with crawlers between West Sister and Sputnik. Most of the other boats had a few fish but nothing of any size, we had some fish but nothing very big (largest was 17 inches). We were using dipsy's set at 120 feet back on one side of the boat and jet 20s set at 90 feet back on the other. Best spoons were the watermelon and blue huckleberry early on and then we put on a Mi-Hi and that became the hot lure of the day.The lake got flat and it was getting hot so you would think the fishing would slow down. Around 10:45 AM the fishing picked up for us and the size of the fish were improving. We stayed in the general area and started getting some larger fish. The crew felt better because we finally had some decent fish in the cooler. We kept our 18 walleye and had 11 walleye that we put back and decided to head for port for the "measure in". The official results for the A.W.W.T. are as follows.

1st place - Team Bird's Nest - 69 2/8 inches

2nd place - Team Serenity - 63 7/8 inches

3rd place - Team Starfish - 60 5/8 inches

4th place - Team Lucky Strike - 56 3/8 inches

5th place - Team King B

6th place - Team Wally Widetrack

Big fish was caught by Team Bird's Nest - 25 5/8 inches

I want to thank everyone who fished today's event and hoped they all had a great time. The weather was great and the lake was calm, something we have not seen for a while.