08/31/2026
Port Bay Derby - Ella and I had enough to bag us 2nd place! Full story below 👇🏼
Started the morning off slow with a few small bites on a shallow offshore structure. With it being overcast and mist in the air, we moved to a good stretch of docks and caught a 4 pounder on a frog. Feeling pretty good and having a big fish in our livewell, we finished out that stretch with no real luck. We hit a few select docks on the neighboring stretch and caught a 2.84 on a 1/2oz jig to fill our 5 fish limit. Optimistic, I moved to some offshore structure that typically has a couple big ones. First cast I hooked a big one on a minnow, another 4 pounder. It’s now 11:30am and we had right around 15 pounds. Port bay usually takes 17-18 to be in the money, so I knew we still had work to do. This place is not big, with a lot of grass and weeds. We returned to the offshore structure that we had initially caught our first fish on, and caught another high 2 pounder to cull out a small 12 inch 1 pounder we still had in our well. Still need another good one, that high 1 pounder ain’t gonna cut it. Ella pushed me to look for some new offshore structure and I found a piece of driftwood that looked like a wagon wheel. 2nd cast I hooked a fish on a Texas rig senko, a high 3. With an hour left, we felt great. My bubba scale had just over 17, we have a chance!
We loaded the boat and bagged our fish. The guys before us had 19+, damn it! We weigh in 17.68, good enough for 2nd place.
I want to give a shout out to my girlfriend Ella. She was pumped to fish her first tournament and was a great partner all day! I would get hung up on fish when we were using Livescope and she would urge me to move on, she helped with fish management, netting, and helping with decision making (there’s a lot of decisions to be made in 8.5 hours of fishing).
If you made it this far, you’re a real one! 🫡
