John Murray's Blog

Gotta love combined weight! My partner, Pete, throws a giant 128 pointer on 8lb test across this point and catches a 3.48lber- good for a grand- and good weight for us! Today was a struggle, we only caught 7 keepers, and couldn’t cull a small smallie. At least we fought our way to a top 10 finish. We weighed 10.21lbs, and finished 9th place. Congrats to Clifford Pirch on winning his 2nd Open, and I’m off to the showers!!!

Gambled this morning by going to the back of vegas wash, and it didn’t work! Had two good bites there in practice and none today. I did catch a huge carp that I thought was my kicker. I caught three in the lower basin by 9, then took off for temple bar, and finished my limit there. Culled quite a few, but only ended with 8 something. I need to regroup tomorrow, but I’m not sure how. Guess it’ll come to me by morning, I hope!

5 for 9.97lbs, I like my start! Caught my first limit by 8am on jigs, then started running new areas looking for better fish. Ended up with about 20keepers, but the best was only about 2lbs. Caught largies and smallies, it was a great day out in the wind! Gonna go for it tomorrow, try to catch a big bag to have a chance to win. Actually played it safe today, so as not to take myself out of it. 11.6lbs is leading, so it’s wide open to win. Go big or go home!!!

I prefished off and on for the last 4 days on Lake Mead. We had the Icast show, so thats why I’d spend the mornings on the lake, and head to the show about noon. Hot is an understatement for Mead, it was 119 at the docks at Callville on thursday! The nice thing is, that the fishing is good for Mead and you can catch ‘em many ways. Topwaters like Rico’s and spooks are the way to catch the big ones, and worms and jigs will catch your numbers. We have over a 115 boats, so it will be a great tourney. I really didn’t prefish any of the areas that I plan to fish, so it’s hard to tell how I will do, my first day is always my worst, so if I can do well tomorrow, I’ll feel great. Off to sponsor row now, I’ll report tomorrow!

Wow, what a spectacle! This morning, the start boat said something, and over 50 boats took off, shotgun! With 500 boats on a fairly small lake, the boats were everywhere. We headed down to some fish my partner had found in prefish. He caught a nice one on a frog, and I flipped a keeper. Once we got into his best area, he caught 3 in a row on a swim jig. We then hit a few other areas, and I caught a frog fish and one on a jig. We headed in at 3 with about 10.5 lbs (took 12 for a check). Watching 500 teams weigh in, in the Alabama heat, was grueling. After the weigh in, all of us pros got to throw tackle out to the crowd for 20 minutes, thats right, we threw 1000′s of dollars worth of tackle (including reels, depthfinders, even trolling motors), out into the crowd. I hope no one got hurt, but it was the craziest 20 min that I’ve seen in a long time! They then gave away a fully rigged boat, and a chance to win a truck. Mark’s Outdoors did a fantastic job with this tourney, and I was proud to represent Powell Rods. By the way, Powell gave away 50 entries to family teams (like father/son/daughter) and there were 250 family teams entered! What a great event, nows time to get some sleep and get up early to drive to Georgia, for the next event!