Had the bass club tournament at Margarita today. Also got my Bill Murphy book a couple days ago. I've already read 257 pages, hehe. Anyway, fished with Zack on his boat with no big motor. His motor's getting re-paired so we were trolling motor only, marina bound. I got one right off the bat on the rico in the morning (good color suggestion chris ;-)). Shortly afterward we saw this fish boil in the mats, so I pitched my frog at it (luckily I had the frog rod in my hand, waiting to make a cast) and sure enough got it to explode on it. Unfortunately I set up on it and then just kind of mushed into weeds. Think it was hooked for a couple seconds, but that's frog fishin. After that we didn't do much for quite awhile until Zack got one on the senko. At around 10 we ventured around the corner of the marina, toward swimming pool cove in the very first cove as you round the bend of the marina point there. I was throwing the mission fish around the weeds, using this retrieve I was messing around with a couple days ago, and sure enough got thumped. Now, the unbelievable part is I actually caught the fish. It was incredible. When I fished that bait previously I was 2 for 7, and on those two I was super alert and absolutely kathwacked em, but this one I was just kind of spacing out, and set the hook normal, and for some reason I stuck it. Oh well, that one was 3-4. First weigh in was at 11. I weighed in 6-18 for two fish, Zack was 1-50 for his. As bad fortune would have it, we ended up taking off early before the second weigh in (for the second time in a row, for me at least.....). I did manage to catch a trout on dropshot in the afternoon and had one fish bite the worm off my dropshot later on, but Zack had to drive to Arizona this evening, so he was pretty anxious to get home and we weren't doing much good anyway, so we bailed. Better fishing than I expected even though we weren't on a real pattern, and just picked up some random fish. At first weigh in Dennis Wright had 19lbs. for 4 fish, and I assume he ended up winning it. Big fish at first weigh in was 6.5 I believe. Not a bad tourney.
-Brian

Getting the hang of the Miss...ion Fish huh? One thing I forgot to tell you about the hook is that you can take your pliers and bend the point and top wire section of the hook to one side just a little bit. When skin-hooked on the top of the bait, this puts the hook point into one side of the bait where the mold ends and a slight resevoir of material sticks up. Hook penetration will be better, and bending the hook doesn't seem to weaken it.

That Rico color probably didn't make a difference, but for me it's all about confidence in that color. Tournament fish go a long ways towards building that confidence. Good job dude.