As far back as I can remember, I think this was my debut in a lure fishing competition in Poland. At least in a serious competition. The decision wasn’t easy, because my friend Czarek and I had trouble fitting it into our schedules. On top of that, I have no chance of taking part in the second round in September, which is a big issue in the context of the whole league. Still, we decided to take part and have a great time, and maybe we’ll be able to find a substitute for September (the organizer allows this).
Back to the point – the competition lasted two days and took place on Lake Ukiel in Olsztyn. There were a lot of concerns about the lake, mainly related to three issues:
– the small size of the lake
– its location in the city, meaning local pressure and the number of sailboats and motorboats
– fish stock
As it turned out, it wasn’t crowded, and everyone could fish fairly freely.
Terrible weather discouraged people from being out on the water, so we could move around the lake fairly safely. And what about the fish? In my opinion, it was good. Perch fishing was excellent, and pike fishing was decent. The weather conditions and passing fronts didn’t favor feeding activity, but we still managed to dig out some nice fish.
We did two days of training and concluded that we were catching perch quickly and of decent size of 25-35 cm. But pike with LiveScope were a problem. We caught many more catfish than pike. I didn’t have any experience with catfish on LiveScope until now, so I had a hard time distinguishing those little tadpoles from duck-billed ones (pike). Luckily, I managed to learn how to tell them apart, and during the competition, we no longer wasted time casting at the wrong species.
The first day went great – within 2 hours we already had a full set: 3 pike (97, 81, 64 cm) and 5 perch (29–31 cm). We caught the first two pike one after the other using the LiveScope, and the third the classic way, near the reeds. For the rest of the day, we were upgrading our perch sizes centimeter by centimeter and looked for bigger pike, but only caught small ones. That was enough for us to take a solid lead.
We were worried about the second day because we suspected the fish would be much harder to catch with Live. Overall, there were few fish in open water, and most were probably already “trained” by the competitors. Still, we started with the same tactic. This time, it didn’t work. We found fish, but they were swimming away from the lures. So we switched to old school – covering weed beds and reeds and looking for perch. Surprisingly, we did worse with perch than the day before, and it took us almost an hour to find some that would react. We spent the rest of the day fishing weed beds for pike. That was a good decision, although the execution was much worse. We only landed 2 pike (70 and 57 cm), and three got away, including a meter-long one 🙁
In the meantime, we managed to upgrade one perch to 40 cm.
That was enough to win the entire competition and brought us a lot of points for the league, so we achieved a much better result than expected. We didn’t count on much for our debut, especially since we don’t have much experience fishing in “the weeds” in the Lake District 🙂
Finally, I’d like to praise the organizers and participants. The atmosphere was really nice and friendly. You hear so many bad things about fishing competitions that I had much lower expectations. A very pleasant surprise!
