Team Crouse – Edgarton Destroy at Honeoye

The club held it first paper catch and release tourney in recent history on May 21^st on Honeoye Lake, the little Largemouth factory in the western Finger Lakes. The format was a little different. Boaters and non-boaters were paired and fished together as usual, but each boater had a non-boater partner in some other rig who he shared weight with, and vice versa. The person sharing the boat verified and recorded the length of fish before immediate release.

The weather was cold, wet and nasty. A series of strong cold fronts came through before and during the tourney, bringing rain that came in sideways and winds strong enough to “almost” blow Bob Rudeau into the drink. Even with the bad weather, the small fish were definitely chewing and almost all the field brought in a five fish paper limit and caught a bunch of fish on the day.

Howard Crouse & Jeff Edgrarton took 1^st place. Crouse shared his boat with Curtis T. Waterman, who for the second tournament in a row led his boater to the lunker fish. Crouse’s big fish was just over 20” and taken in skinny water. Howard also had a near 20” bookend to solidify the top bag for the day. All of his fish were taken shallow mixing it up between a spinnerbait and a senko. Edgarton was fishing the Randy Lamanche and they fished pretty much the same pattern as Crouse. Jeff also alternated between a senko and spinnerbait, but mixed it up with a fluke. Jeff has a solid limit with a number of 14” to 17” fish – hard fish to find on this little lake absolutely loaded with 10” to 12” Largemouth. The key for Jeff was to slow his wacky senko way down and work it toward the bigger fish holding tight to the inside weed edge.

In Second Place was the team of Brett Milliken and Rich Dodge. Brett shared his boat with Tom Pavlot and Rich fished with TD Patrick Grady. Brett fished a different pattern than the winners, concentrating on the deep weed flats and the water to the drop. By the way, the lake already had great weed growth with nice stands of cabbage, coontail and milfoil growing out to about 14’. Brett very slowly worked a crank most of the day. He just missed lunker with a 19 ¾” and had a solid 17” to go with it. Brett also took a five-spot from Pavlot who bet that no greenback would be dumb enough to take a buzz bait, let alone a RED buzz bait, under the conditions we had. Dodge was not available for comment but took most of his fish on a Senko in 4’ to 8’ with scattered grass.

Placing was team Eric Barker/ Tom Pavlot. Eric Barker was paired with Don Florczyk. Don took an early limit and took Eric to the woodshed for the first half of the day running his 8-Ball spinnerbait. Eric though was able to get a limit of some better quality fish running a chatterbait. Eric’s boat was in the same type of water is Milliken’s for the most part. Tom fished with Milliken and worked the same reasonably priced “American” crankbait that Brett was good enough to share with him. Tom sped to the BPS for those cranks on his way home but the shelves were empty.

Notes: Thanks to the TD/TC for putting this on. This unofficial “two-day” was a great time – I wonder what it would have been like if the lake was on fire? Also, thanks to Bob Rudeau for volunteering to fish so that we could avoid a triple-up.

rsa