Over the weekend, I fished the FPT central region on Don Padro. It was a great event with crazy weather. I was only able to get out once to pre-fish, the Wednesday before the tournament. The week before the event the weather had been stable with warm sunny days reaching 70 degrees. The weather was forecasting a storm to arrive on Friday and continue threw Saturday. My game plan for pre-fish was to find as many spawning areas as possible to come back to tournament day and blind cast on, I thought sight fishing would be out with the storm and high winds predicted. After finding a few good bedding areas I employed to other great techniques to find fish. First is the River2sea S Waver 200, this is a great bait to not only get big bites on but will get a lot of followers
The key there is to watch where the fish are coming from and how aggressive they are. Most of the fish I found following the S Waver and bites I had came on the first points out side of the spawning areas. Very few fish seemed to be aggressive but more so following the bait out of interest or instinct but still showing me areas with higher concentrations of fish. The second bait I threw to quickly find fish was the River2sea whopper plopper 90, which is a great search bait that can also help eliminate water quickly. I ended up finding a few post spawn fish on the plopper in the backs of coves and on steep banks.
So tournament day was here, I immediately ran to the first spawning cove were I had seen the most cruisers. I started the morning out with reaction but quickly realized the fish weren’t having it. So I opted for a senko with a small Reins tungsten nail weight.
Within a few casts, I picked up a 3lber! After a few more dinks I got the kicker bite I needed! Unfortunately, she didn’t make it to the boat. After a few minutes of sulking I was back at it! The fish were still on beds and cruising for the most part, you had to make a tone of cast in the small areas to get the better bites. Later in the day the sun came out and I was able to get up shallow and sight fish. A crucial part of sight fishing is polarized glass, I use Edge eye wears Brazeau in copper.
I typically stick to copper and amber colors for sight fishing. The fish on beds seemed a bit skittish when you got close to them so I backed out and continued blind casting senkos the remainder of the day, make a few small culls. We ended the day with 16.19 lbs good enough for 9th place. Hope this helps and good luck out there!
Hope this helps and good luck out there!
Thank you,
Josh Parris