Otter Lake

Sunday 9 June 2013

Otter Lake is a small private lake south of Meridan, NY. This is our second paper tournament for this year. Paper tournaments allow us to fish for bass, but instead of bringing the bass in to weigh at a central location, the fish are measured and released immediately into the water.

Boats launching

Our starting air temp. at 6 AM was 57 deg. F. partially cloudy skies, a slight wind. We fished for 7 hours and when we came off the water the temp. had risen to 78 deg. F. with sunny skies. The water temp. was 66 deg. F. with a slight ripple.

Dick Hyde and Don Bell in the foreground. Duane Poole and Mike Overton behind them ready for blast off

The lake has a 5 mph speed limit on it, so in this sense no one had an unfair advantage as far as boat size or horse power. Also this tournament was hole tournament. A hole tournament is where the lake is divided in sections. Every hour members must rotate to a new section. No unfair advantages here.

Paul Hudson with a 18 inch large mouth bass

Logan Hudson with a 12.5 inch large mouth bass.

Logan was our guest today. Logan wanted to experience tournament fishing and on this outing picked up some fishing tips, learned some new techniques and was able to catch a couple of bass in the process.

Tom Hudson and Jeff Botting trying their luck in some deeper waters

At 1 PM we returned to the docks, brought in our measurements. The measurements were then converted into pounds using the NYS DEC conversion of inches into pounds, which is a rough estimate.

6th place, John Woods @ 9.26 lbs.