John Murray – Twin Finishes in Florida 47th place and Two Checks

Two tournaments in the books, and I ended up 47th again at the St. John’s tournament.

It’s unbelievable actually, two identical finishes in tournaments on two different lakes; I finished 47th at the Harris Chain too.

Anyway, I did the sight fishing thing down at Lake George with most of the field, I didn’t find any big ones the first day but I caught a lot of keepers. Then on the second day, I found a big one and caught it right away; it was really nice to have a kicker in the livewells of my Z521 first thing in the morning. I found a couple big ones on day three, but I couldn’t make them bite.

I really caught them well on the River2Sea Nest Raider but I had the small one and on the second day I couldn’t find my bigger ones and it turned out to be a big no-no that I didn’t have my bigger baits in the boat, so I never caught those big ones on the last day.

Looking back, that’s the biggest thing I would change, I’d have put all my big stuff in the boat. I have the stuff to catch them real well; I just didn’t take them with me.

I caught them really well on a Texas rigged tube and I caught them on the Nest Raider on a Powell Endurance 775 and an Ardent XS1000 reel spooled with heavy fluorocarbon line. But, that’s about all I did was sight fish; I didn’t do any other sort of fishing.

It was really interesting, we stayed in a place that had zero cell service, and I parked under a tree so we had no satellite TV reception either. We did have a little bit of Internet connection until it got dark, and then that went away too.

It was a pretty remote weekend, we had a great time; we stayed in Salt Springs, Florida in a camp ground there.

Now, we are heading to Lake Lanier and the PAA tournament that’s starting next week. We’ll spend about a week and half there in Georgia and check out the areas there.

T.J.’s grandma and aunt are coming down to come see him, so we’re looking forward to that too. Overall, it was a decent start to the Elite Series season, now we’ll just see if we can move up from there.

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