Anglers In Action Tournament With The Great Wayne Today

End of the Little Niangua fishing laydowns and docks, creek channel banks and secondary points at 27mm bluff ledges and bluff ends at 17mm.

Today Wayne and I took out of PB2 in the AiA shoot out tournament. The tournament take off was delayed about 15 minutes due to a severe thunderstorm that came through. We took off in a steady rain and ran from PB2 to the very end off the Little Niangua. Our game plan early in the week was to sight fish for spawning bass, we had about 18 pounds or so located with about 15 fish marked. However due to the rain and rising water we knew those beds would be too deep to site fish. This past week there has been a consistent bite on wood lay downs, so we ran to the back of the Little Niangua to fish the wood in that area and to flip shallow docks. We caught three small keepers off the wood, but we could not get any really big ones to bite. We decided to abandon that pattern about noon, and ran to the Tan Tara area to check out some secondary points and the spook bite, then to some bluff ends and ledges. We caught a fair share of short fish but not more keepers. After we finally said “Uncle” we went to one of Wayne’s neighbors house and sat on his dock to have a beer, as we were taking a look around his dock we saw a 6 pound+ female and small male bass, getting ready to spawn on a fresh new and shallow bed. We were both surprised to see that yet another waive of spawning bass are just now coming up and making beds in shallow visible waters. Overall it was a tough tournament for us. The post spawn timeframe can be a difficult time to catch some big ones. But as most tournaments, someone was gonna get em. First place was over 19 pounds and there were several limits weighed in with 16 pounds getting one of 6 checks paid out.