Monthly Tournament Newsletter - Clearwater Bass Club

2011 - Monthly Tournament - 2012

WEST LAKE TOHO

JUNE 18, 2011

he start for this tournament weekend was a bit different for me. My family has been vacationing at Vistana Resort, now a Sheraton property, for 26 years. If the tournament hadn’t been at Toho, I’d have had a rough time making it as we were finishing up our week at Vistana.

On Friday, my wife dropped me at the ramp about 11:00 AM and I met up with Buddy Doyle. He and I fished pretty hard for about 3 hours and the heat finally got to us. It was HOT ! I think I went through 6 bottles of sport drink !

We met up with "the guys" at the Golden Link Motel in Kissimmee. We cleaned up and went across the street to Smokey Bones restaurant where we indulged in a plethora of food and drink Naturally, as we were eating, one of the famous central Florida "thunder-boomers" showed up and drenched the area ! It had cleared the area by the time we finished eating and everyone made it safely to the motel.

I strolled back to Publix to get a larger ice chest. I was pretty sure I’d need the room for extra drinks on Saturday. This proved to be quite true.

Saturday morning went fairly smoothly despite having another tournament launching at the same time. There was at least one "bump in the night." A member of the other club ran his bow up on John Fugate’s (my boater/angler for the day) stern (sounds lewd doesn’t it ?) and seemed to not understand that the boat going FORWARD and UNDER POWER has the responsibility to stand clear. Anyway, John and the owner ironed this out at the end of the day.

Daylight found John and me working a canal he knew something about. We managed to catch plenty of power lines and boat docks over the ensuing couple of hours. We worked the canal hard for a couple of hours and then pursued the wily bass all over Lake Toho !

John ended up weighing in three keepers and I managed to find one. As usual, mine came out of an unexpected little break in the seawall.

Page 2

1st Place

2nd Place

3rd Place

Chuck Bearce took First Place with a 5 fish limit. Total weight was 9.95 pounds with a 3.57 keeper for his big fish.

Second Place went to Bill Poirier, also with a 5 fish limit totaling 9.75 pounds and a big fish weighing 3.21 pounds.

Bill Christy, Bill Coker's co-angler, rounded out the top three with a 4 fish bag weighing 5.89 pounds

Big Fish for the tournament went to Mark Dorne with a 4.19 pound beauty. He also weighted one other bass and finished in sixth place with 5.40 pounds.

Overall, we had 16 fishermen bringing 43 fish to the scales. Total weight for the tournament was 67.58 pounds with 3 5-fish limits. The heat costs us 5 dead fish.