Billy V Niagara Pro Am report

[Billy V]

Sorry I've been so negligent in posting reports here lately - I've had some pretty major life changes going on (all good stuff) and it's been all I can do to make it to the boat on weekends to fish let alone post reports afterwards. Here's a quick report from the Niagara County Pro-Am for our team. It's been a crazy couple of weeks so some of the details are kinda fuzzy...

We pre-fished right out in front of Wilson and had a great day taking lots of Kings and a few cohos in 125-150. We primarily fished the top 70 FOW with spoons and found both big and small fish in those depths. Best spoons for us were the NK glow frog, DW midnight special, and NK Die Hard fished off of riggers. A green dot spinny/Siggs Gangster fly was our best paddle set-up, but it really was pretty much a spoon bite for us on Friday. We felt like we had a pretty decent program put together for the weekend and we were hopeful that we could put together a decent box each day.

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On Saturday morning we went back to our waypoints from Friday and found that our 60 degree surface temp had plummeted to 56 degrees. We checked the sonar for about 10 minutes and didn't like what we saw, so we saddled up and made a 15 minute run West towards the red can and sat the boat down at 6:00am and set up in 150 FOW and pointed it NW. We had a lot better water temps there and we found tons of receptive fish. Like most of the rest of the field we had a stellar day and were completely wrapped up with our 12 fish by 10:30 am or so. The same spoons and flasher/fly combos we'd used the day before worked great, but we didn't have the size of fish that we had the day before. It was primarily a spoon bite for us on Saturday but late in the day we figured out a program for pulling a couple of bigger fish that would end up saving us on day 2. We saw all the boats around us fighting fish all day long, so we knew that there were going to be a lot of limit catches and we figured that we'd be mid-pack with our box. Turns out we were in something like 22nd place after day 1, but we were part of that tight group of boats bunched up with 220-240 points or so and we figured with a better box on Sunday we might be able to cash a check.

On Sunday we headed back to the same water off the red can and set up out a bit deeper in 240-300 FOW where we found our biggest fish on day 1. The program that we put together on Sunday was entirely different than the way we had fished on Saturday. On Saturday we'd been fishing the top 70' with mostly spoons and took a lot of smaller fish, but late in our morning on Saturday we threw out a 400 copper pulling a flasher/fly combo and that pulled our two biggest fish of the day for us. Hmmm...could it be that we fished over the top of the bigger fish?? We thought so, so we loaded up our east end deep king program on Sunday and had at it. We set up with 400, 500, and 600 coppers, all pulling flasher/fly combos, divers out 270-340' loaded with flasher/flies, and riggers with spoons down 80-120'. Turns out our hunch on fishing deeper with flasher/flies was right on as we found bigger kings and came in on Sunday with the 3rd biggest box of the day at 263 points. Our best combos were a green Spinny/Sigg's Greeen Hypnotist, and a green dot Spinny/Sigg's Gangster fly fished off the 400 and 500 coppers. We also took some nice Kings on the deep riggers pulling a variety of our favorite spoons - Glow Frogs, Die Hards, NBK's, and Midnight Specials.

At the end of the day on Sunday we ended up coming back from 22nd to finish 7th, which we all felt really good about. We loved fishing under the no communication agreement, had a blast fishing together, and were looking forward to fishing at the Oak the next weekend. Kudos to Yvan and his Get it Wet team for a great two days and the win, and also to the Pro-Am committee for their hard work in putting together another great show.