Caney Fork Outdoors Team #3 fished our third RiverBassin tournament in Cartersville GA. It only takes three tournaments to qualify for the Championship which will be hosted by Caney Fork Outdoors in Silver Point TN. My whole goal was to qualify for the championship and my hope was to add some points to give our team a fighting chance in the championship.

The morning started out different than we expected. Chris Slaughter, my team mate, got down to the area early enough to check out the area we hoped to fish. After looking around and seeing a lot of folks tubing the river he called an audible. I had mapped a few spots for us to check out so plan B came in. Plan B turned out to be an awesome float with plenty of spotted bass or I should say plenty for Chris.

Chris was on fire catching the three fish he needed pretty quick. After seeing how good he was doing I knew I could cost us some good points and possibly a win if I didn’t catch something. He was already culling fish before I had my first fish in my NuCanoe Pursuit. After slowing down and a good luck text from the wife I caught my first fish a 13.25 inch spot.

Next came a 10.25 inch spot which put me at 23.25 inches.

I needed a third fish and was now worried I would cost us the win since Chris had about 48 inches of bass. My third fish hit and I could tell it was a good fish. When I saw it I knew I had a good one hooked. My netting skills where horrible and each run made me think I am about to blow this. It took three runs before I finally netted a 17.75 inch spot.

After all the trouble I had netting the fish I almost lost it of the measuring board before I got a picture. I got two quick pictures before I did lose it off the board. Lucky for me one of those pictures was good enough to submit.

At this point I knew we had a chance to win the tournament as a team. I still wanted to cull the 10.25 inch bass and figured I might be able to do it. Well it never happened and after all of our fish where submitted we were in 2nd by .25 in the tournament. After photo review the 1st place team got docked .25 inches which put us in a tie for 1st. The bad part about this is the team that submitted their fish online first won the tie breaker. We submitted ours last so it looked like 2nd place was going to us.

We made it back to the weight in and I was kicking myself for not getting the 4th fish to cull the 10.25 inch one. Chris was kicking himself for not submitting his fish earlier. Well as fate would have it the team we tied with did not make it back by 3:30 and they ended up getting disqualified for not making it back by 3:45. This put us in 1st place by 8.75 inches. I wish we could have won outright but I’ll take the win the way we got it.

Caney Fork Outdoors Team #3 is sitting in 6th place overall at the moment. We still have at least one tournament before the championship to replace out lowest finish in Knoxville. The top three tournament scores for each team count for your points total. Our next tournament is August 22nd in Columbia TN.