Team Turkey Shoot

A few words (and bust-a-gut hilarity) from our own Jon Devries...

The “meet and greet” was a hoot in the parking lot at Markley giving everybody the chance to catch up, talk some trash and have some laughs. But the true moment of glory belonged to Pollard as he drove his rig into the parking lot and past everybody that was parked there and engaged in conversation. Pollard proceeded directly to the ramp – noticed that he was the only one there and then came back to the group realizing that he drove past us without even knowing it. We all got some mileage out of that one!!!

...Mother Nature and the weather man need to get on the same page – what we were hoping to be overcast skies and mild winds with the pre-frontal conditions moving in turned into blue-bird skies with gale force winds! Needless to say that the main lake was inaccessible for the most part – Matty and I tried to run it but got around the corner at “the rock” and the Nitro 901 was air born and at times near vertical as we got hammered by the waves!!! Matty was laughing and I was, well, in a nutshell, white knuckled and bug-eyed (I sure hope those stains come out of my pants)!! Matty asked if I wanted to run it to which I promptly replied “n-n-n-n-n-n-no”! Pollard was close behind and decided to shut it down after he saw our air time!!! Good decision Mark!!! But the site was a thing of beauty at the shotgun start with 3 and sometimes 4 boats running abreast one another through the narrows. I wish we could have had somebody on top of one of the surrounding hills to get a shot of that. Seeing the Z-9s and the 901’s and “the beast” (that would be Bruce’s boat) from one of those vantage points must have been awesome. On to the fishing…….

So, needless to say the bite was fairly tough for all of us but especially for those of us that couldn’t prefish during the week like some of the others (no names necessary). Matty and I started out fishing the north bank at the top of the narrows and low and behold, this Z-9 promptly pulls up in front of us and starts fishing our water!!!! That’s not very nice! Well, Billy decided to stick a fish right there in front of us and I’m thinking “hey! He stuck my fish”!!!! Well, for some reason unknown to me, they ended up following us around the narrows for the rest of the day. Go figure?! We moved down to the mouth of Little Portuguese and within minutes….there’s Billy. We moved further south of Little Portuguese working around a point and….there’s Billy!!! So as we’re working the shoreline towards each other Billy decides to hurl a swim bait towards us! Now mind you, Billy is fishing off the back of the boat which means he had to throw that bait over his partners head….well, all I can say is if I would have tried that I probably would have hit Matty in the head! But we all got a good laugh out of it and continued to egg each other on. On to the weigh in……..

Let me start out with this statement; “Karma is a thing of beauty”….more on that later. What started out the week before as bags over ten pounds ended up being bags under ten pounds for the tourney. Ron agreed to take on the role as Weigh Master which was greatly appreciated. But we soon realized after he threw the third or fourth bag of fish back into the water that he didn’t weigh anybody’s big fish. Well, that called for a quick modification to the rules which virtually eliminated the big fish category and just increased the size of the pot for the overall winner. So, without delaying any further, here are the results of the tourney:

1st place – Bruce Sheldon
2nd place – Gil and Brian
3rd place – Billy Hines and his partner (sorry, can’t remember his name)
4th place – Matty and Jon
5th place – Ron Brown
And the last and final position goes to… (Oh yeah; remember that Karma thing I mentioned earlier? Well, the king of trash-talking learned all about that on this day!!!!)….Mark Pollard!!!