St. Johns River 11/11/06 added pics

We had our club classic on Saturday near Lake Harney (Sanford, FL) on the St. Johns River, which I ended up winning with one fish. It was the top five guys points wise from the first and second halves of the season. As a co-angler I was responsible to find a boater to take me out and I would be in control of the boat so that all ten of us are on an even playing field as boaters. The weather was a little chilly in the morning with light fog here and there. We started by running to the North end of Harney and looked for schoolers at the head of the river flowing out of Harney, nothing happening. We ran a Little further to the next creek coming into the river, Deep Creek it had pads and hyacinth on one side with cypress roots on the the other we fished back in about 300 yds. with three half hearted bites/no hook-ups and I caught one mudfish on senko's. We then fished our way back out on the other bank, I picked up my horny toad to fish it across the pads. Right at the mouth of the creek on the point of the pads after about six casts I saw a set of pads jump and here came a bass tearing out, so I dropped the toad at the edge of the pad and bang it grabbed it heading for deep water. She ran me around the boat pulling drag and nearly wrapped me up on the big motor, finally after 3-4 minutes we netted her into the boat. Wow what a fish she was every bit of 28-30 inches long but real skinny with a big head. We put her on the digital and it read 7.3 lbs. but we were skeptical that she had to be more than that for her size. The rest of the day we looked for more pads with the hyacinth and I caught four more bass but they were all 13 1/2" and we needed 14" since we didn't have permits for this tournament. I missed or the fish missed several more times on the toad as the sun warmed the pads. We came to weigh-in to find that it was in fact a tough day, three guys had two fish each, two guys had one fish each, and I actually won the thing by almost two pounds, her actual weight was 7.15. The one fellow had a fish slightly over 5 lbs. and he thought he had it in the bag, but my observer told me to hold out and wait to last to weigh in, so I did and they were all wound-up when they saw my bag as I walked over, calling me a sandbagger, They ask if I caught any and I just said one, they never ask how big. It was indeed a good day!