Silver Lake, NY 8/12/06

I gotta stop having these frustrating days on the lake. I don't know if I can take the emotional rollercoaster associated with tournament fishing!!
This tourney probably presented the most enjoyable weather of any tournament I fished in '06. Beautiful day and decent fishing.
This was my first ever visit to Silver Lake, located in Livingston County, NY just off route 390 in western NY, just west of Letchworth State Park. The morning started out kind of slow as I was doing a lot of searching. Thick weeds and 10ft.+ water produced zilch. Finally around 9am I made my way to the north end of this small lake where I found some weed pockets and a channel line. There is an inlet and a separate outlet up here that looked quite good, but produced nothing for me. I worked my way over to the eastern side in the shade where I caught a small keeper on a Maniac Salt Stick. I then came upon a little cutout bank, and this is where the story begins...there were a couple of laydowns in the shade next to a bank covered with red moss. I flipped the purple Salt Stick up in there only to hang it in the bushes!! It was here where I impressed myself. I set that rod down and grabbed another rigged with a Texas-rigged Berkley cherryseed tube. I dropped the tube in where I WANTED to put the salt stick, and it no sooner started to sink and off it went! I set the hook and landed the 3.70lb. beauty!! Obviously not the biggest bass in the world, but a great tournament fish and the fact that I did the smart thing and saved the area and was able to pull a fish out of there was particularly satisfying for me. It was the only fish of the day caught on that tube. The rest of the fish I caught that day were caught on either that purple Salt Stick or a Bass Pro yellow and black stick-o. Both lures were rigged weightless and with the exception of one keeper caught in a weed pocket, all were caught under boat docks and around red moss banks. I put four keepers in the boat that day, losing my fifth keeper three times in the last two hours of the tournament. I finished 5th that day, less than a pound and a half from the top spot. That elusive fifth fish would have given me my first tournament win I am confident of that. There's always next year!!