Tour Championship Day 2

Day two of the championship is also known as "cut" day.  Basically you are fishing the first two days in order to be able to fish two more days against the top 10 anglers.  I was sitting tied for 4th after day one and knew a weight similar to my day 1 weight would be good enough to keep me in the top ten.  My goal was to go out and do exactly what I did on day one, catch 5 20 inch walleye and hopefully get a kicker to upgrade my weight.

My Co-angler for day two was Justin Steinke from Wisconsin.  Justin was the Co-Angler of the year, meaning he fished all 4 events as a co-angler and had the highest placing average finish of any of the co-anglers.  I knew having Justin in the boat meant that eventually we would have a good weight as I had a lot of confidence that Justin would get his share of fish if I put us on them.

We started day 2 in the exact spot I started day one.  After our first troll through the deep trough I noticed there were very few fish laying on the bottom and that most seemed to be much shallower in that 21-23 feet of water.  The shallower I trolled the more fish we marked on the Humminbird.  Once again, my Humminbird did not lie.  Just before we finished our troll Justin connected with a nice fat 21 inch walleye.  It was a good start to the day but the numbers of fish were not there, at least on the line I was trolling.

I decided to run up and give spot two a try North of the Hazelton launch.  I saw several fish caught at this spot but all we could manage was one short walleye so I opted to make a run down to the Cannon Ball River area to see if I could get a couple smaller fish.  We were using a lot of time up and weren't putting any fish in the box so I needed to find us a limit of 5.

The run to the Cannon Ball proved to be a good call as after trolling about 100 yards Justin hooked into a very nice walleye.  After netting the fish, I could see clearly it was the kicker we were looking for.  This fish would measure 24 inches and weighed roughly 5.5 pounds.  It was a great second fish but we needed to get a limit.  Unfortunately that big fish is the only one this area would give up so I headed back to where we started the day with a plan to troll much shallower.

With time going by fast we set up to make a pull where we started the day and within the first pass trolling shallower we pulled 3 walleye that we were able to keep.  In fact, not only were they keepers, they were nice fat 18-20 inch fish. Those three fish rounded out our limit by 1 PM and I knew I had plenty of weight to get to fish two more days as all our fish were around 19 inches with a 21 and 24 incher also.  I opted to not beat up on the fish to bad and we called it a day early knowing we had plenty of weight to make the top ten.  As I said earlier, getting into the top ten is all you need to do after day two you don't need to be in first.

After weighing over 15.5 pounds on the day I was now sitting in second place going into day 3.  However, on day three they zero our weights and we start over.  Tony also weighed a nice limit of fish and we both easily made the top 10.  We knew we were catching the right size fish to make a run at this . We knew we had a program that worked and spots that should hold up for 2 more days.  Now it was just a matter of going out and executing our plan and hoping for the right bites.