We had our club "classic" tournament on Saturday on the city pool of the 3 rivers, here in Pittsburgh, PA. Only the top 20 guys in our club qualified to fish this event and it was our highest payout event of the season. If you're familiar with how the 2005 Bassmaster Classic and 2009 Forrest Wood Cup went on these waters, you'll know it's a dink-fest. So a 15-17" fish is a giant. 

 

My partner and I prefished the weekend before, and my partner fished again on the Thursday before the event. We weren't overly confident, but we thought we had a game plan figured out. Well, it ended up raining for about an hour on Thursday night, and this muddied the water up and totally changed the fish for us. After not getting anything in the first two hours with our original game plan, we switched to fishing the various bridge pilings in the river. We eventually came across a bridge piling that had millions of little fry everywhere around it. Upon pitching a bait at this particular piling and reeling back up, it spooked the little fry and made them act frantic. Immediately, 4 smallmouth came up and started snatching up the baitfish. This tripped me off on what I needed to do to get these fish to bite, and that was to stir up the baitfish that they were hanging around. So I backed off, and started throwing squarebills and 2.8" Keitechs and burning them through the schools of baitfish. This pattern started to produce for us and got us all the fish that we weighed in. 

 

I was the last person to weigh in, and I believe I ended up around 8th place. My fish got put into a weigh bag and I walked them down to the water to release them. Upon reaching in to get my big fish out for a quick picture, I saw something that I had never seen before. My biggest smallmouth (around 15-16" in length) had my smallest smallmouth (12.25" long) in his mouth and down to the back of his throat. How this happened, I don't know, but I was shocked to see that a smallmouth this small could fit a fish this big into its throat.

 

 

That's nuts! She must of been trying to help you win big fish lol. Never seen that before

That IS a little wacky ~ 

Congrats on the decent finish.

Oh, and nice Bibs.

A-Jay