Tournament Recap #5 Aug.21

My next adventure took me to Chapeau Quebec for the Allumette Fire Dept. annual bass tournament held on the Ottawa River. This tournament is one of the better payouts in our area with a $3000 first prize which usually brings out a good crowd.  This year's extremely low water levels made this stretch of water very dangerous to run as well as very difficult to fish. Normal fishing areas were left high and dry by river levels that were 5-6 feet below normal. I fished this day with my Brother in-law Marc Schofield out of his boat a 20x Triton with a 225 HO Etec. This stretch of river is very narrow and twisty which can make for some awful interesting navigation and Marc's boat it pretty fast so we used it to try and out run the other competitors. We were in the first group and Marc got us out front so we had no other boats to worry about and we got to our first spot with no troubles. We spent a couple of hours fishing familiar water with nothing to show for it. We then went to an area Marc had found in pre-fish that was holding some good smallmouth. We pulled in and within 5 casts we had a school of smallmouth busting on a topwater but we missed 2 of them. Then as fast as they started they shut right down. We couldn't manage to find the school again and then the skies opened up with a torrential down pour just to rub salt into our wounds. We decided to go back to a spot that has always been productive for us and spend the rest of the day there hoping the fish would move in. When all was said and done we managed to scrape together a small limit and finished way down the board. While hanging around the weigh-in we saw a site I never hope to see again, a fellow angler with his 150hp motor sheared off after hitting a floating log in the middle of the channel. Luckily no one was hurt but I would guess the boat and motor would be a complete write off. There were many other boats at the weigh-in with missing lower units, missing skegs, and smashed props due to the amount of logs that had been exposed due to the low water. All in all it was an OK day but we did learn that for next year we will need to learn some new areas on that stretch in order to find some good largemouth areas as that it what seems to take to do well in this tournament.