Kudos to this year's winners. Couldn't find a thread about the 16th annual so I figured I may as well start one. We had 4 hits and 2 near misses on the first day. A few dogfish and I also cranked up a 50 lb octopus, quite the grind from 250 ft.! The first three hits were split up between my 2 fishing buddies, missed fish in the morning... tsk tsk, we coulda been outta there! But I didn't razz them like they normally razz me in the same circumstance, I'll save it for later 
. .
We were anchored along the SW corner of Constance with the rest of the fleet around 200 - 250 ft. I don't know, it seems that derbys tend to bring out the careless types. The ebb was picking up again around 1PM so we decided to pull anchor and try a calmer spot. We had JUST got the anchor chain thru the ring when some clown comes whipping through and drives RIGHT OVER our anchor rope. We watched him coming and were wondering why he couldn't see the BIG ORANGE BALL (on his right) being dragged behind us (on his left). Luckily my friend driving the boat cut back on the throttle so the rope sank enough for the clown's leg to pass over. So if you were approaching SW Constance at around 1:30PM in a 20-22 ft. all white, hard top double eagle, you came VERY close to messing up a lot of people. Right after that ANOTHER guy was cruising in on our stern, we managed to successfully yell and wave him off as we needed room for the pickup. It all happened so fast we didn't even think to have a knife handy to cut our tag line in a worst case scenario. We moved to the 140 ft. mark and got a little guy (26 lb) and couldn't be bothered with the weigh in.
Next day we went back to the same place. Nothing was caught on the bank all day, not even a dogfish. It didn't occur to us that it might have been fished out the previous day. Anyway, we got some darn nice fishing weather and sunshine in and I got my 50 dollar hat!
. . We were anchored along the SW corner of Constance with the rest of the fleet around 200 - 250 ft. I don't know, it seems that derbys tend to bring out the careless types. The ebb was picking up again around 1PM so we decided to pull anchor and try a calmer spot. We had JUST got the anchor chain thru the ring when some clown comes whipping through and drives RIGHT OVER our anchor rope. We watched him coming and were wondering why he couldn't see the BIG ORANGE BALL (on his right) being dragged behind us (on his left). Luckily my friend driving the boat cut back on the throttle so the rope sank enough for the clown's leg to pass over. So if you were approaching SW Constance at around 1:30PM in a 20-22 ft. all white, hard top double eagle, you came VERY close to messing up a lot of people. Right after that ANOTHER guy was cruising in on our stern, we managed to successfully yell and wave him off as we needed room for the pickup. It all happened so fast we didn't even think to have a knife handy to cut our tag line in a worst case scenario. We moved to the 140 ft. mark and got a little guy (26 lb) and couldn't be bothered with the weigh in.
Next day we went back to the same place. Nothing was caught on the bank all day, not even a dogfish. It didn't occur to us that it might have been fished out the previous day. Anyway, we got some darn nice fishing weather and sunshine in and I got my 50 dollar hat!
