A competition format I'd never seen before. They are having a week long varied competition in Wisconsin right now called the 'outdoor games'. Great variety of events
- target shooting
- field competition with water retrievers
- lumberjack events (pole climbing, log rolling, etc.)
- dog agility competitions
- and other outside sports.

New this year is an angling event. Boat angling with pairs competing. The final weigh in is the best 3 black bass (largemouth or smallmouth) and the best 3 walleye (almost identical to zander).

Wisconsin fishing regulations do not allow culling so what you put in the livewell has to stay. Maximum limit of 5 bass and 5 walleye with the largest 3 of each counting.

Since the two species like completely different locations and need completely different tactics, each pair of anglers includes one professional bass angler and one professional walleye angler. Usual is for the professionals in one branch of the sport to know next to nothing about the other branch so they have to rely on their partner for location, lure choice, tactics, etc.

Two day event with 8 hours fishing time each day. The starting point is on one of a 5 lake chain and another lake is well known for producing large numbers of huge bass but is about an hours run so to fish it cuts your fishing time down to around 5 hours to allow a safety margin getting back for the weigh in. Another lake is only about a 30 minute run and has a good population of large walleye but the bass are only average size.

Day one finished with one boat weighing in over 21 lbs of fish.

The part of day two I was able to watch had a boat that opted for the bass trophy lake and they had one fish in the live well but it was a largemouth weighing over 15 lbs and they still had about 3 hours fishing time left.

Interesting to see the anglers on one of the other boats trying to figure out early in the day if they should keep largemouth of slightly over 2 lbs. If the fishing for the day is good with large fish, then obviously not. OTOH, there are days when you will only boat a few fish and none of them large so how would you feel if you released several fish that turned out to be larger than anything you caught the rest of the day? Or worse yet, if they were the only ones you caught.

Fun stuff to watch.

[ 18. July 2004, 05:23 AM: Message edited by: Newt ]

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That sounds a fun way forward! I like the idea of mixed disciplines, like pole climbing and angling. I can just see our average Brit match angler trying that one!! Lifting a pint of Boddingtons is the limit for some of the less agile ones.

Newt, I fished a club tournament yesterday on Lake Michigan with a friend and placed second out of 12 boats. The one I'm holding in the photo below is a 21 lb female, which won the biggest fish prize. We ended up taking $95 home plus our 5 king salmon.

Last tournament we placed third or 13 boats and took largest fish, an 11 lb lake trout (AKA a Pooper), and scooped $90. We may be banned if we keep this up.

How about you? Do you ever participate in tournaments?

Ken

Nice to see conservation in action. Still, they probably had WMD and deserved it.

That comment wouldn't surprise me from some posters but from you, it really does.

Severus took legal fish from a huge lake where the population is not in any way threatned. The fish will be (or already have been) eaten.

Unfortunately Newt some people in the UK seem to have decided that killing fish is always wrong.

It probably stems from the differences that have been discussed before regarding the pressures of fishing here in the UK compared to the US.

But it still saddens me when people cannot accept that different opinions and practices are perfectly valid, and feel the need to resort to cheap shots like the one above.

Should also have added that the tourney you started the thread with sure sounds interesting. Do you know the final outcome?

And finally congratulations to you Severus, good bag of fish and well done on the result.

[ 19. July 2004, 06:55 AM: Message edited by: NickInTheNorth ]

http://espn.go.com/gog04/ and scroll down a bit to "Brauer, Gofron hook up gold".

Severus - to answer an earlier question, I don't fish tourney events these days. If they'd been around when I was younger, I probably would have but I like a slower pace at this point. I will do an occasional carp tourney but only for the social parts - although if I happen to win I am hard to live with for a few days.

And let me add to Nick's congratulations. The Great Lakes are big enough I'd have trouble figuring out how to approach them and I am somewhat in awe of you folks who fish them regularly.

Nick - thanks and I have seen that sort of reaction before. Just really surprised to see it from fenboy.

[ 19. July 2004, 08:39 AM: Message edited by: Newt ]

Thanks Nick and Newt, we had a great time out there. And you're absolutely right about the fish population here, Newt, it's very robust. In fact, there is documented evidence that coho salmon will die off en masse if their forage (alewives, smelt, etc) disappears. That has happened in the past, and divers have reported the lake bottom littered with dead, starved cohos in the past. Every fall our rivers are filled with salmon, which spawn and die as part of their life cycle. Awful odor.

Ken

I would suggest that Fenboy was just being contentious Newt. His comment also coincided with UK media revelations that WMD did not exist and that it was just a poor excuse for going to a war that was not of our own.

If fish are to be eaten then where is the problem?

[ 19. July 2004, 04:32 PM: Message edited by: Peter Waller ]

It always amazes me that UK anglers can be so self righteous about killing fish.

Despite the great care we go on about, fishing in most of the UK is basically rubbish compared to what's available even in the most densley populated parts of the US! What's more, fishing in the US is run and protected by the State game organisations - they have strictly enforced bag and size limits.

The US philosophy seems to be that if you protect the environment then anglers can take limit numbers of good fish without harming the population.

In Britain we only to be interested in protecting the fish but let the environemnt go to pot. Most anglers in this country fish for domesticated carp in ponds that are stocked to levels that simply couldn't be sustained if it wasn't for the fact that anglers also throw masses of ground bait in!