We broke the pier heads at 6am after sleeping in our cars with the AC on all night. The humidity was terrible, so sleeping on the boat was a no go (even with two fans). We headed West and set down in 90fow and worked NW.
Our program for the morning consisted of 3 riggers parked at 80, 100, 120. The two deep riggers had paddles on them and the high rigger in the center was run with spoons cheated. We ran two Deeper Divers set on a 1.5 setting out 275'-350' throughout the day. Lastly, a 400 copper, a 500 copper, and a 600 copper. All the coppers were towing flasher/fly combos.
We got set-up and didn't move a rod for about 30 minutes. All of a sudden our new prototype custom Albino Gator Spin Doctor with an A-TOM-MIK Sweat Pea fly starts SCREAMING! I'm on the rod and he isn't stopping. AS we are trying to tame this beast I look right and here is a charter captains pinching in on us. I look left and there is Tom Burke from the Cold Steel. We are feeling the pinch. We call over to Burke and he makes a quick turn and allows us the room we needed. We had to raise our riggers so that we wouldn't take his coppers. Oh, by the way the other guy yelled at us for not knowing how to drive! Anyway, we boat that fish a while later and its a healthy 25lb BRUTE. It's on! We need 3 more decent ones now.
We trolled on to the NW and picked away at fish. Mostly small ones, but a few keeper Salmon would hit our deck. Our next big guy would come late morning on a 500 copper pulling our custom Green SmartFish with an A-TOM-MIK Hypnotist fly. He tipped the scale at 19 pounds. We knew we needed one more good one, so we kept trucking on to the West. We were on the phone with a few buddies (Billy V and the Candy Team) and knew that there was a pick all the way through to West 9 mile point. We have always done fish off West 9 mile point in previous years fishing this tournament.
It was early afternoon with about an hour and a half to fish and our new prototype custom Albino Gator Spin Doctor with an A-TOM-MIK Sweat Pea fly starts SCREAMING again. We get on the rod and within minutes our second 19lb Salmon hits the deck. We didn't think we had enough weight, but we knew it would be close. We continued to pick away at some smaller fish, but we would have never taken a tournament box of fish by days end. Our last fish of the day took the 400 copper (first bite that rod took all day) with a Chrome E-Chip/A-TOM-MIK Frozen Frog Fly. About 1:30pm we said enough was enough and headed for the scales to see where the cards were going to lay.
At the sales a few nice fish were weighed in, but only one other team was able to string three of them together. They missed out on 1st place my a measly 1 pound. We won with 63 pounds and change to take the 2010 Fat Nancy's Shoot Out.
