Mantz wins on windy Spiritwood Lake

 

Spiritwood wow what a pretty lake.  Several members showed up the day before to fish and what a beautiful day it was temps in the 80's calm wind and the fish were cooperating everywhere we went.  A lot of people camped out the night before and we had a good time. There is a little restaurant with a bar on the lake and a great camping site.  Forecast for tourney day was not good though as vicious storms started to roll thru the area around midnight.  Tourney morning dawned and the weather was completely different the wind was blowing 20 mph out of the NW and only increasing throughout the day, the sky was cloudy, and the remnants of rain were still there. 

  Numbers were drawn boats took off into the building waves and fishing began, while not a big lake the good thing about this lake was the fact that almost 100% of it was fishable and held fish.  Fishing was tough on tourney day the wind was horrible 25 plus all day making boat control difficult, lots of small fish being caught throughout the morning and some anglers were driving around looking for bedded fish and having some success doing that.  Jeff and Janine were having a good day boating plenty of fish although they had to take a break because of livewell troubles.  Shaun was finding his groove catching some nice fish on crankbaits; he just couldn’t find the 3rd keeper.  The boys from Minot had a tough tourney and the fish beat em this time around but I am sure they will come right back. 

  Marty was having a tough morning catching nothing but dinks but he kept returning to a good-looking point time and time again until the fish finally cooperated boating some nice smallies proving that persistence is he key to fishing and pulling out the win with 9.98 lbs of smallies.  Marty also caught big bass with a smally weighing 3.89 lbs. Shaun Keena got his best finish so far at 2nd place catching two nice smallies for over 7 lbs on crankbaits, and Jeff Wetzel got 3rd place with some nice fish. 

A lot of anglers had a tough time in the wind and a few found success.  Overall, I would say this lake has a lot of potential and there are some very large smallies in there and we had a great time being our first time there, it is too bad Mother Nature had to hammer us with hurricane winds all day but that is fishing in ND.  Driving home into this wind I tell ya was an experience!  I could literally see the gas gauge dropping as I drove!  Thanks to everyone that showed up, we had 17 anglers see ya guys at Audubon and Sakakawea.