The Herman Lucerne Memorial Backcountry Tournament started off this past weekend on friday September 25 with the kickoff party and some good food. The week prior to the tournament I got out a few days to stay dialed in. Ken joined me on friday for some fun/prefishing, and we found lots of high water like most people but we also found some good fish holding in areas that were usually to shallow. We had our game plan for the tournament and we stuck to it. We started day one of the tournament jumping small tarpon early in the morning on lures and jerkbaits. I lost count on how many tarpon we jumped but managed to land two on artificial. We then got into some snook and some redfish. Our snook did not get pass 26" all weekend but we did manage to upgrade our redfish to 27.5". Ken also managed to get a 13" snapper and 18.5" trout on artificial putting us at around 108 points. Fishing was tough some parts of the day with higher than normal water levels. Only 3 slot snook were caught for the tournament on Saturday with no slot snook caught Sunday. We spent the last hour of the tournament throwing bucktail jigs at tailing bonefish to get more points on artificial but we could not seal the deal. We packed it up and checked in at the Lorelei in Islamorada. After check in we headed towards Sundowners in Key Largo for the awards and dinner ceremony. Ken ended up winning Artificial Grand Champion in the guided division with the most points on artificial overall. Ken and I had a great time fishing and competing in what has to be one of the most challenging tournaments around with 7 species being the target(Tarpon, Snook, Bonefish, Redfish, Snapper, Seatrout, Black Drum). Thanks to Charlotte Ambrogio, Lloyd Wruble, Tony Nobregas and to the rest of her team for putting up a great event as usual. For more information on the tournament visit their website at www.hermanlucerne.org.
A few pics of the week/weekend
TightKnots,
Capt. Steven Tejera
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