BPS Simcoe Open

Saturday, October 25, 2008
As many of you know, Paul & I had entered the Bass Pro Shops Simcoe Open, our first foray into a Professional Tournament. 1st Place paid $10,000 with a $10,000 bonus for a bag over 30 Lbs (5 fish). If you could break the current Canadian Small Mouth record (9.84 Lbs), you would win a Toyota Tundra and Nitro Bass Boat!
We were the long shots in the Tournament, not only being rookies and having one of the smallest boats, but Friday was our first time on the Lake! Canada's best and most famous anglers were in this tournament. Our goal was to finish in the top half of the standings (40th or better in an 80 boat field.
We met around noon on Friday and pre-fished for about 5 hours trying some of the spots we had been gathering from fishing buddies. It was windy and cool and the best we could do was catch a perch. It did however give us a chance to see the lake and relate it to the hydrographic maps we had been studying. We pulled the boat and had an excellent dinner at the Lake Simcoe Arms Restaurant and then went over to register for the tournament. We registered and picked up our gift bag and went back to Paul's to visit with Evan for a bit and retie a number of rods in preparation for morning.
We left Paul's at 5:30 am and got to the launch at Sibbald Provincial Park an hour and a half before the start, where it was already a gong show, but a well organized gong show. We got the boat in the water, passed inspection and did some preparation before our blast off. We were boat #48 and would take off in the second wave at 8:15 am. It was very well organized with a staggered launch based on a digital read out from a pontoon boat well offshore.







Fishing proved to be extremely tough with wind and steady rain. Many of the spots that we wanted to work already had a dozen boats on them. We tried the shoal off Fox island and the backside of Fox that had structure similar to what we caught our fish at Cooch last week....nothing. We worked the South West side of Snake Island where we were seeing lots of balls of baitfish and lots of "hooks" (larger fish) off an edge in about 25 feet of water. This tournament is all about electonics in trying to locate fish that may be suspended over 30 foot humps in 50 feet of water. Paul finally says "Get the net!" His rod is bent over and he's got a good one on. Turns out to be about a 10 pound Pike. You can see how excited Paul was to catch this.



The day ended on a bit of a sour note for us as my alarm started going off on my motor eveytime we got over 3000 rpm.........$$$$$$.

The weigh-in was very professionally done with boats (that had fish) trailered up to the stage and fish weighed while being interviewed by Dave Mercer.


It was kind of weird sitting out in the water listening to the weigh-ins. You realize that the last boats coming in don't really have much idea of how well they're doing and haven't seen a lot of the awesome fish that have already been weighed in.





Mike and Howard Gifford had the winning weight of 28.36 pounds!!





The good news is that we achieved our goal by finishing 40th! Unfortunately, we tied with 40 other boats (including many high profile fishermen that had pre-fished all week) that got the old "bagel" as well!
It was a great experience and our only regret is that we didn't have fish to weigh-in.
Wait till next year!

More pictures here John Bennett Photography