Last Sunday at Lanier 12 members of the Spalding County Sportsman Club fished our November tournament. In 8.5 hours we landed 14 keeper bass weighing about 34 pounds. All were spots, not a single largemouth was weighed in. There were no limits and four people didn’t have a keeper.

I managed to win with four weighing 11.84 pounds and my 4.30 pound spot was big fish. Niles Murray came in second with three weighing 6.49 pounds, Raymond English placed third with two at 4.71 pounds and Billy Roberts was fourth with one at 3.26 pounds.

I was looking forward to this tournament since I had won the Flint River tournament at Lanier two weeks earlier. In that tournament I landed three keepers the first two hours on three points not far from where we launched. So in this tournament I headed to those points as soon as we blasted off.

After three hours of casting with nothing to show for it I was real frustrated. In the Flint River tournament wind was blowing in on the three points where I caught fish but in the Sportsman Club tournament the wind was not hitting them.

A little after ten I ran to Mud Creek and stopped on a rocky point where I had caught my biggest spot ever, a 4.27 pounder, in a club tournament about ten years ago. The wind was blowing in on this point, so hard I had trouble fishing it, even with a spinnerbait.

As I rounded the point I saw some brush on my depthfinder but the wind was too strong to stop on it. After I got around to the lee side of the point I put down my spinnerbait and picked up a rod with a four inch soft swim bait on a quarter ounce jig head tied on it. I had never caught a bass on a swim bait but I knew it should be good.

After a few casts on the point I felt my line tick as the bait sank in about 15 feet of water. I managed to set the hook and finally land a spot that weighed 4.03 pounds. That really cheered me up!

I made a few more casts with the swim bait then picked up a jig and pig since I was in a good position to fish the brush I had seen. As the jig came through the brush a fish hit it and I landed the 4.30 pound spot, my biggest ever! That gave me two four pound spotted bass at Lanier in one day! Enough to win the tournament, but at the time I didn’t know that.

I got those fish recorded on my GoPro camera and it is a real comedy watching me try to get the fish to the boat, pick up the net and get them in the boat since I was by myself. What you can’t see is the fact I could see the fish in the clear water the whole time I was fighting them and was scared I would lose them.

I fished that point another hour without a bite then tried a couple more similar rocky points with wind blowing in on them but didn’t catch anything. At about 1:00 I went to a point back in Mud Creek and found a brush pile on it. After throwing out my marker I cast a jig head worm to it and landed a spot that was just barely 14 inches long.

When I got on top of the brush I used a drop shot and immediately got a bite. After a long fight on the light rod and eight pound test line I landed the two pound spot. That was it for the day although I fished hard until the end at 3:30. It was weird, I caught two fish two times within ten minutes of each other but nothing else in the 8.5 hours! That’s tournament fishing.