Team Mossy Back Fishes the King Kat Classic

By James of Team Mossy Back

Team Mossy Back fished the 2005 King Kat Classic held on Santee Cooper Reservoir at Rock’s Pond.  The field consisted of 149 boats.  We qualified for the Classic on West Point Lake.

We started out our adventures this year by prefishing the upper lake, Lake Marion.  We felt our chances of winning this year’s classic would be in our ability to find fish on the upper lake because the lower lake would be slammed pack with 95 percent of the Classic field..  Did we find fish?  Did we ever.

Our first day of fishing found us drift fishing from one side of the lake to the other.  We were drifting eastsoutheast to westsouthwest with a 25 MPH winds were pushing us that way.  We were using whole blue back herring as bait.  We were covering water from the 25 foot range down to around 11 feet deep drifting over several humps and holes in each drift run we made.  We caught 14 fish, with our 7 biggest fish weighing in at 175 pounds.  Not bad for a first day of prefishing.

Our second day found us once again drifting the upper lake but a few clicks south of where we had fished the day before.  We were using the same tactics but had a slight change in wind direction.  We picked up 10 fish with our 7 biggest fishing weighing in at 149 pounds.  Not bad for a 14 fish two day total of 324 pounds.  At the time we did not feel this weight would win the tourney based on previous tourneys and the number of big hawgs that can come out of the lake.

On day three of prefishing we went out for two hours and caught 2 fish one weighed 26 and the other weighed 14 pounds.  SO we felt we had our strategy nailed down and could find enough quality fish to place in the top 10 of the tournament.

Hurricane Ophelia nags fishermen

The first day of the tournament proved to be interesting.  Hurricane Ophelia was hanging off the coast of Florida/Georgia/South Carolina with really no direction of where she was heading.  What it did do was increase the winds to around 35-40 MPH.  There were 4-5 foot waves on the water where we were fishing, kind of the norm for us tournament fishing on Santee. 

Day one of tourney -  Sticking with our strategy of drift fishing we picked up our first fish of the day about an hour in to the tournament and it was an interesting one.  We were using 4 poles of the back of the boat and I decided to use one straight down of the side of the boat.  I put extra weight (total of 4 ounces) on the pole to keep the bait underneath the boat so it would not tangle up with our bait/line out the back.  Within two minutes of putting that pole out BAM a fish was on.  The fish went straight for the back of the boat.  He was stripping drag and then I could feel him get tangled in something.  After further investigating we realized he had become entangled in our drift sock and the foot of our outboard.  With some careful maneuvering we got the line untangled and the fight was back on.  Three minutes later we had landed our first fish of the tourney, a 38.25 pound flathead.  Not bad for our first fish.  We knew if we could average what we had our 2 days of prefishing we had a shot to win it.  Being tossed and turned by the waves all day, we managed to only catch 3 more fish for a total weight of 54.6 pounds on day one.  We were not happy with this and figured we had a big hole to overcome going into day two.

To our surprise, at the end of day one we were sitting in 16^th place, 35 pounds out of first place.  The weather had caused everyone to have a low weight total.  We were hoping the weather would improve and we could get on those pre-tourney fish.  Didn’t happen.

Day two of the tourney was almost identical to day one except the wind direction had changed ever so slightly.  Hurricane Ophelia was still causing havoc on the east coast of Florida and on us and the catfish.

There wasn’t much to talk about of day two’s day except we had 4-5 foot waves again.  We managed to limit out on fish but they were smaller fish.  We could only muster up 35 pounds of fish on day two for a two day total of 89 pounds and some change.

Team Mossy Back finished 23^rd out of 149 teams competing in the 2005 King Kat Classic.  We lost one fish on day one that would have moved us up to around 16^th place.  We lost him 20 feet from the back of the boat. 

It was a well organized tournament and we are looking forward to qualifying again next year and competing in the 2006 King Kat Classic to be held on Lake Pickwick in north Alabama.

Click here for results of the 2005 King Kat Classic

Other Links
for anything...