2021 American Crappie Trail National Championship!!!

Trying to get caught up from being gone last week, but finally getting around to posting a report. ACT does their championship for the prior year in the spring of the next year and we were one of the 100 teams invited to complete. IT was held on Lake D'arbonne in NW Louisiana and we like that lake. Came in second last year at the Crappie Masters National Championship in fact! Clay went over Monday morning and I got there Tuesday night. The storms kept me in town checking on my clients to make sure they didn't have any tornado damage. The wind was pretty bad every day but the last day of the tournament and being 3 day elimination tournament you had to be careful to save enough fish for all 3 days assuming you make it that far. They let everybody fish the first 2 days and cut the field to the top 25 for day 3 and did a drive through weight in that was really cool! Day one found us with 2 good fish and 12.47 good enough for 11th place. The leaders had 13.99 on day one so a pretty good hill to climb! Day 2 the wind was terrible and we ended up in a small creek out of the wind with several other boats and managed 4 good fish and 13.25 which moved us up to 5th place! Still a 1.5 behind the leaders. Sat we started in that same area with 5 of the top 6 teams. We bugged out around 10:30 with 11.20 on our scale as those fish seemed played out to us and we had quite the deficit to overcome and made a move to the south end of the lake! First fish I stuck down there was a 2.11 and we stayed in that area until it was time to check in our bouy at 3pm. We culled up another 2.5 pounds in our second area and ended up with the largest stringer of the 3 day event by .5 pound but it was .01 too light! Another second place finish in a national championship but we're still happy with it! We lost s fish every day that we will remember for a while but onto the next one! We caught most all of our fish casting 1/8pz slab Syndicate jigs on Jenko trick sticks. If they didn't respond to that we dropped a straight minnow rig on their nose with a Jenko X15. Sometimes it took a couple minutes of that fish following that minnow around before they bit an several never did. Sure want to thank all the fine companies that make it possible for us to be out there chasing our dream! We made the switch to Gyll lithium batteries from David at Shut Up and Fish recently and there's no way we could fish like we have been without them. Windy all day on the TM hard and plenty of power! Even picked up a couple MPH on the big motor!

I have some weekdays left in April and May and I think one Sunday left the end of May if anybody wants to get out there and get on the slabs!

Thanks!

Slew

First pic is waiting on the national anthem and blast off by boat number on day 2, second pic is the police escort to downtown Farmerville for the weight in for the top 25, third pic is us on the hot seat, and the last is the payoff pic!!

Thanks!

Slew

Wow, such a great report! ! ! .01 light, that gets ya right in the gut. But Boy Howdy y’all are so dang consistent. Awesome fishing. Love reading your posts.

Congrats guys! Nice report, too. Thanks Slew.

Great write up

Congratulations to the both you.

Congrats to you both, Todd. Lake D’arbonne is close to where I grew up. Fished there many times back in the day. Great write up and pics. Hope to bring my grandson this summer to fish with you again. He still talks about that day and using the “ slime balls “ on Palestine. Take care buddy! 🎣

Missed you guys at Fork!!! Especially after your great show last year!!!!

Congratulations to you both. Nice hardware you guys received.

Congratulations!

Thanks y’all!! Back after em again today! Waiting on 7am lines in! Didn’t get but one day to prefish Fork but man it was good to be back! I haven’t had that much fun in a while! Scales might not reflect t it but we’re gonna have a fun day for sure!! Couldn’t do it without all the great folks that help us out along the way! Thank you!

Slew

Congrats fellers! Nice finish!

Congrats again Todd ! So close but so far !