OGF Rick Seevers/Dick Caudell Memorial Tournament, Deer Creek Lake: Kayaks and Motorboats

Saturday Aaron, Neil, Amanda, and I participated in Ohio Game Fishing's Rick Seevers and Dick Caudell Memorial Tournament on Deer Creek Lake. This year was the first year that OGF opened its tournament to kayak and canoe anglers, so to show our support we decided to head out and see how we stacked up against the motorboats. The general tournament format was as follows:

-Two Person Teams (Aaron and I on one team and Neil and Amanda on the other.)

-Check in at 5:30am

-Fishing begins at 7:30am (Which gave us kayakers much needed time to get unloaded and time to paddle to our fishing spots.)

-Launch from public boat ramps only (No launching from bank spots.)

-Total Weight 10 Fish Per Team (Total Weight, which meant we had to keep fish in our kayaks. We all opted to use fish baskets so we could cull fish if needed. We had a long paddle and a livewell full of ~10 gallons of water would have been brutal and a cooler with ice wouldn't have allowed us to cull live fish.  )

-Fishing ends at 3pm (Which "SHOULD HAVE" allowed everyone to fish the full time of the tourney....but I'll get to that later.)

-Weigh in begins at 3:30pm

The morning started out early for all of us as we had all planned on getting to the check in as early as possible. Aaron had the longest drive at just over 2 hours so his morning began around 2:00am. We all met near the boat ramp at 5:10am where we were greeted by Josh (Big Joshy) and Kim (Lundy) of OGF. We sat around for a few minutes, filled out paperwork, checked in, and then departed. We drove a few miles down the road to a local bait store and grabbed drinks, snacks, and a few dozen minnows.  Neil decided before registration that he was just going to give it a go with all artificials and no live bait.  His reasoning being that something artificial might be a better trigger for the crappie to bite than seeing the same size minnow that everyone prefishing and all the weekend anglers had been tossing towards them.  From there we drove straight over to the boat ramp and began unloading our kayaks and gear.

Disregard Aaron's Time Stamp....his camera is a bit off.

Aaron had spoke to a few friends about the crappie on Deer Creek Lake a week before the event so he was our navigator for the trip. (Neil was the only one of us who had fished the lake prior to the tournament and he informed us that it was nearly 15 years ago for bass and only from shore by the marina and down at the spillway.....so Aaron's info was the only thing we could go off of.) With what he had learned about the crappie on the lake and with the forecast of 25mph winds Aaron decided to seek shelter in a protected cove near the deep end of the lake. With the sun beginning to break over the tree tops we made our way to our destination.

We arrived with only minutes to spare before the start of the tournament. Aaron went to work scanning the cove with his hummingbird equipped with side scan imaging. I did what I could with my hummingbird, but scanning with down imaging only covered a small portion of what Aaron could cover.

He soon found a school of fish near a small point in the creek arm we were fishing. We anchored a few feet away and began working small plastics on 1/32oz jig heads. Amanda and Neil had set up on a couple of fallen trees, they were not relying on fish finders rather what they knew about spawning crappie.  Neil was randomly targeting visible structure and the shoreline with small crankbaits, blade baits and crappie tubes. After a few casts I hooked up with a solid fish.....too solid in fact. I looked over to Aaron and told him not to get his hopes up, that it was surely not a crappie. After a few short burst of drag I brought the fish to the surface....yep, definitely not a crappie.

 After that our fishing seemed to die down, the fish we were marking had disappeared. After an hour and a half and a dozen different spots we noticed that Amanda hadn't moved from the first spot she had set up on. I paddled down to see if she had dozed off or if she was in fact getting fish. I no sooner than got 20 yards away when I saw her set the hook and bring a crappie to the surface. I let her get the fish measured and into her basket, before I asked her how she was doing? She said that she was getting a lot of bites but she wasn't hooking many of them. I told her to bend her hook out a little and see if that was part of her problem....advice that I probably shouldn't have given a competitor but then again I'd had a 2 hour drive home with her.  Meanwhile Neil had hooked into a couple 9-12" bass, but no crappie and he began moving around and exploring all of the shoreline in the cove with only one decent crappie hit.

Aaron and I also began to paddle around every square inch of that cove looking for fish and after nearly 3 hours we found our first fish near a shallow flat on a minnow under a float. At this point I was beyond frustrated because I knew that the fish were there; I could see them on my fish finder, guys where catching them from the bank, guys where catching them from boats, and every ten minutes I'd hear Amanda yell because she had lost another fish. Most days when I'm doing bad I like to blame it on poor fishing....."The fish just weren't biting......Must have been that high pressure......The visibility was too poor....etc." These were all excuses that weren't going to cut it at the weigh in. Aaron wanted to find a new area completely and I fought him tooth and nail. I typically don't like to leave areas that I know have fish and it was clear that this area had fish, regardless of whether we were catching them or not. At about 12pm I had seen enough, Amanda was up to at a minimum of five fish and we were still stuck at 1. Fed up with the results of the cove Neil had ventured off several hours ago so we told Amanda we were leaving, she said that she hadn't had a bite in a while so she'd just follow us. We paddled around the bend and were met with 20 to 30 mph gusts and white caps....not something you want to see in kayaks. Luckily we found another small cove only a few hundred yards away and we tucked into it. Here we found Neil working the back end of the cove. After 5 minutes he yelled over saying this cove was producing hits more frequently than the other cove and lifted his fish basket, he had gotten two fish and one of them was a giant. Neil commented that the fish wasn't really long, but it had a lot of girth to it and it had a really wide top hump to it.  With Amanda's basket their team was up to 8 keepers, Aaron and I had 1. I set up 20 yards away from Neil and started working a small tree just off of the bank. I immediately missed two fish on minnow under a float. I was fuming...every little thing that went wrong erupted into a tantrum. I casted a rod into that tree and hung up a float. Out of frustration I started swinging for the fences trying to free the float. Sure enough it came flying by my head and wrapped up several times around my rod. This particular rod was spooled with braid....and if you have ever used braid you know a tangle leads to a knot, which leads to retying your whole set up.  Everyone else seemed to get a kick out of my brief episode...Neil called it a small temper tantrum. That got me more focused and I quickly tossed another float out and began retying my other rod. No soon than the float had stood up from the weight of the sinker it disappeared under the water. I set the hook and quickly landed my second crappie of the evening.

It was now 12:30pm and we had 2 keepers to Amanda and Neil's 8. With the wind and white caps we decided to set a time limit for ourselves. It took us 25 minutes to get down to our spot without wind so we figured it would take us at least 40 minutes to get back to the boat ramp paddling against the wind. We also needed a little extra time to get loaded up, which we all agreed would take nearly 25 minutes to load our gear up and strap the kayaks down. It would take us 10 additional minutes to drive from the boat ramp to get to the check in so we decided to collectively head back at 1:45pm.

I quickly landed an additional 3 crappie in the next 30 minutes...which was a much needed morale booster. With about an hour to go Neil landed the 9th keeper for their team, and with Neil's big fish kicker they were looking pretty good. I needed to do something drastic to make up for lost time so I tied on a second float and began working two float and minnow combos down the bank. The wind was ripping through the cove now so using floats became difficult. I'd cast one up at the bank and by the time I could cast the other float it had moved 5 feet. I was constantly working the slack out of the line so that the wind and waves wouldn't pull my float off of the bank and toward my kayak. Eventually I settled into a good rhythm. A little before 1pm Aaron paddled past me and asked how I was doing, I told him I had 5 or 6 keepers in the basket. With less than a half an hour to go he paddled up the bank and started working some shallow wood. Ten minutes passed and I picked up yet another crappie, which put us up to 6 (or 7). For once we started to feel a little pressure, we had nearly a half an hour to go and the thought of getting our limit was now becoming a possibility. Amanda and Neil seemed to have stalled out at 9 keepers but were working a tight spot on some shallow wood in hopes of landing their final fish. At 1:25pm Aaron paddles up to me and tosses me a 10.5" crappie which gave us a total of 7 fish, and while I was grabbing for my basket I noticed my float had disappeared. I grabbed my rod and began reeling at a slow and steady rate until I felt pressure. I quickly landed our 8th fish, and probably the our largest crappie of the trip.

My crappie on the board and Aaron's on deck waiting to make its way into the fish basket.

We were now close to getting our limit, but with 15 minutes to go getting 2 fish seemed unlikely. Shortly after I placed both fish into my fish basket I noticed Amanda pulling in a crappie.....they had gotten their tenth and final fish with mere minutes to go.  Then, Amanda picks up one final crappie that would allow them to cull their smallest of the 11 fish caught. At this point time began to fly....minutes felt like seconds. I landed our ninth fish with 3 minutes to go, it would be our last fish of the evening. At 1:45pm we all pulled anchor and made our way out into the main lake. The waves were now pushing 2-3 feet and the wind was blowing a constant 25+mph. After 10 minutes of paddling we had only covered 100 yards of water, and I noticed that Amanda had fallen out of the pack. I looked back to see if she was alright and she had her head down paddling into the wind. Knowing that if she tipped or flipped her yak in the waves we'd never know it, I decided to fall back and stay with her. This was her first trip in her new pink kayak, and she quickly realized that 3 additional inches of width and added stability made for a rough and slow paddle. When I got back to her she said she couldn't do it anymore, she was feeling sick and she wasn't getting anywhere. I told her in a not so nice way, that she had no choice but to do it. She continued to paddle and I dropped behind her. As she paddled I pushed the nose of my kayak into the back of her kayak, which was just enough to keep her going forward in between her paddle strokes.

As Amanda and I rounded the bend we noticed that Aaron and Neil had parked their yaks on the beach and were walking up the hill. Twenty minutes after we pulled anchor we had successfully covered only 200 yards of water. At this rate we were definitely not making the weigh in at 3:30pm.

Luckily for us, we had attracted the attention of a local park ranger who admitted he saw us while driving across the top of the dam and let out a bit of a chuckle. He had drove over to the beach, I assume to get a closer look, and that's when Aaron flagged him down and asked him for a ride back to our vehicles.

The ranger told Neil he better get in the front seat since the back had very little leg room, so he jumped up front and told the other they had to get in the back of the paddy wagon!  Amanda with her best "I survived the 30mph gusts, but how did I end up in the back of a ranger's car?" look....

Once again disregard Aaron s time stamp.

Twenty minutes later Aaron, Amanda, and Neil arrived with our vehicles and we began to load our gear up. Amanda and Neil had to cull a couple fish and as they were measuring their fish I decided to count our fish.....1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,and 9........no wait 10. At some point during the day I had miscounted the number of fish in our basket. I yelled over to Aaron and told him we had ten, he immediately ran over to count for himself....if you would have been there you would had thought we had just won the whole darn tournament. A couple of shouts and high fives later we went back to loading our kayaks up.

At 2:50 we made our way back to the boat ramp where the weigh in was held. Somehow word had gotten out that we were stranded on the beach and as we were driving by a few of the boats whom had gotten back early we were greeted by, "How was the beach?.....Hey, you made it!.......Were you working on your tans?..etc."  Neil shot back jokingly that we had our limit by 10AM and that we decided to just go and enjoy the rays on the beach and not sure what they were all fussing about.  Everyone seemed to have gotten a kick out of our situation.  We finally pulled into a parking spot and snapped a few pictures.

Again Aaron's cameras time stamp is off.

Neils Big Crappie at 1.45lbs

Eventually 3:30 rolled around and it was officially time for the weigh in. I had the opportunity of writing the scores down as they were announced, which was pretty cool. I immediately noticed bags of giant crappie making their way to the scales.

After a few teams weighed in, it was time to weigh in the first kayak team.....Aaron and I. We didn't have a stand out "Big Fish" so we opted not to weigh one. We finished with 10 crappie with a total of 5.6lbs.

It was then time to weigh Amanda and Neil's fish. They had also gotten a limit of 10 fish, but they had a big fish to weigh in. Neil's big fish went 1.45lbs and their total was 5.15lbs.

As the other teams weighed in I realized we were well out of the top ten places, one team even weighed a total of 10 crappie for 8.9lbs....that's an impressive average of nearly 15oz per fish. As the prizes were being prepared I took a picture of the weigh in board.

 Twelve of the 20 teams weighed a crappie over 1lb and twelve of the twenty teams weighed 10 fish for over 7lbs. A few minutes later the results were tallied and the prizes were ready. The top three teams received plaques and the top 2 big fish received plaques. Neil's 1.45lb crappie was edged out for big fish by another anglers 1.6lb crappie, but big enough to take the second place big fish and earn him a plaque and his team $70.  Neil joked that dragging the crappie around in the basket all day probably lost .15 oz's worth of scales and fins and he actually had the big fish of the day.

They then raffled off a ton of items including Big Joshy Swimbaits, Crappie.com visors, crappie kits, a half dozen rods including one custom rod, etc.

We wanted to say thanks to all of the guys who put the tournament together, all of the sponsors, and all of the guys who made the tournament enjoyable. Also a big thanks to OGF for allowing kayakers to take part in the event.  Even though our weight totals didn't measure up to the top spots held by the larger motorboats we still got our limits with 30 mph gusts around the lake while being limited to two small coves and we even landed the 2nd largest crappie of the tournament (out of 220 fish brought to weigh in and probably another 100 fish that were culled).

OGF will be holding the second event in the fall on September 27 at Alum Creek Lake. Hopefully we can get together a few more kayak teams and get a team in the top 5. If you wanna check out the rules and or pre register follow this link.......OGF Alum Creek Tourney.  Now we just have to get some of the motorboat guys to join us on the Buckeye Kayak Fishing Trail!

Contributing to this blog post:
Amanda, Aaron, Sean, & Neil