TBF state championship tourney

The TBF/FLW youth Virginia state championship was saturday at the Chickahominy River. Me and 3 other guys from my club that qualified arrived at the docks around 5:30 and stood around shootin the bull for a while til the boat captains finished drawing and registering. I was drawn, with a kid from the old club I used to be in, to a guy with a brand new 20 foot Stratos ASX with 250 VMax, it sure was a pretty boat. We got all of our stuff loaded in the boat and launched at 6:30, and I have gone 70 MPH in a bass boat before but man this boat just blew that away I'm not sure exactly how fast we went but it had to be upper 70's or low 80's. After the blistering fast run we pulled up to our first spot and I started throwing a buzzbait around shallow pads and grass, after about 20 minutes of throwing the buzzbait I picked up a t-rigged sweet beaver in black/blue and made a pitch into the pads. I worked all the way to the edge of the pads and then right as I was about to reel it back up one sucked it in, I set the hook and swung a nice 2lber into the boat. The boat captain told me that there was a drop-off right on the edge of the pads so the fish must be on the break and not in the pads, so we backed off and fished the break for a little while with no more bites. We then motored over to my second spot which was a shallow flat with cypress tress, pockets of pads, and a feeder creek where I continued switching between the beaver and the buzzer. After about 15 minutes I ran my buzzbait across the mouth of the creek and another beautiful 2lber inhaled the black buzzer. After that the other kid caught a keeper and I caught a nonkeeper off of a dock with the sweet beaver and we then fished for several more hours without a single bite. At about 2:00 we pulled into a major creek right near the launch, called Diascund creek, to try and fill out our 4-fish limits. I tied on a ZOOM 4inch dead ringer in Moccasin Blue with a 1/0 hook and an 1/8oz weight as I was getting pretty desperate, I pitched it around for a while and then with my last cast to a brush pile before we had to leave for the weigh-in I set the hook and swung a fish into the boat. The fish turned out to be an 11.5 incher I've never been more frustrated in my life, and I could not stop thinking about it on the way back to the ramp.  

After taking the boat out of the water our boat captain drove us up to the stage, where we weighed in by boat number, and we waited in the boat and the blistering 92 degree heat to weigh our fish. When the emcee guy finally called us up there the boat captain pulled the boat in front of the stage and the other kid on my boat was called to weight first, his fish weighed like 1.3lbs or something like that and put him in 10th or 11th place. I was called up next and I hauled my two fish to the scales, my weight was 4.3lbs which out me up somewhere in the top 5. After the rest of the kids weighed in I found out that I came in 5th and only a couple ounces separated me and 4th place, which made me think that if that little 11.5incher had just stretched a little bit more I could have been up there with a plaque and a trip to the Nationals in Arkansas. But oh well I guess I'll just try again next year.

Sorry about the extremely long post but I was pretty excited about my finish and wanted to explain as much as I could.