For each article I try to search and find something that Dan hasn't included in his preface for each lake in his past articles. He's written a number of articles on Manistee tournaments, so it was hard to find something he hasn't reported on before. I did manage to find a small piece of Manistee history which I thought was fairly amusing.
The book "Main St., A Portrait of Small Town Michigan" by Manny Crisostomo, included an introduction by a Michigan native Tom BeVier. He tells of a man during the Depression who traded a Zenith radio for 15 acres of land on Manistee Lake. The man's friends in southern Michigan said he was foolish. He and his father traveled to Manistee three days later to check out the 15 acre purchase. They settled into the little log cabin that was on the property, and that was part of the community that remained from the lumber boom. That first evening they sat on their cabin porch and watched the sun set over Manistee Lake. The son said to his father, "This is the most beautiful sunset I've ever seen." "I think I'll hold on to this land." And to think it all came for the price of an old radio. I wonder if I keep my iPod if someday I could work the same kind of deal? Ah, maybe not quite.
The early hours of June 26th found 20 boats making their respective ways to the
Stronach launch on Manistee lake.
Some traveled far, while others were able to stay in bed until just an hour before the start time. The locals like Fred and Jeff Brauneck, and Alan Pike and Jack Kowalski, were a couple of the Teardrop teams who could have rode their bikes to the launch. The rest of us didn't need our GPS to locate the lake, all we had to do was follow our noses. You can smell the paper mill on the east end of Manistee from a long way off.
My partner and I got up early again to make our 1 hour 45 minute ride. After our mishaps on the way to the last tournament, we wanted to allow plenty of extra time. About 30 minutes into our ride, Brent uttered the same fateful words he said two weeks earlier "We've got problems!" My stomach turned, and I about twisted my neck off looking out the rear window of the truck. I figured we had smoke or flames coming from the trailer. He then informed me that the net was left on the deck of the cabin. One of those things you remember while traveling to your destination, yet are too far down your path to turn around.
We had friends from Iowa in for the weekend at our cabin. We took them out fishing Saturday, and since there was a third person in the boat, the net was in the way, so we took it out.
We decided that we had plenty of time and would detour through Ludington and stop at Meijer and buy a cheap net. That cheap net cost $35.00. Oh well, that was better than having to do a trailer repair on the road. Plus, we were going to be on smallmouth waters again and lipping those spunky little guys can be a challenge. I think our new net is getting the handle chopped off and will stay in the boat regardless.
As we began nearing our turn off for the launch, and still 5-6 miles away, I was blaming my partner for the offensive odor in the truck. He denied it, and I rolled the window down to let the fruitful aroma escape, but wait....it was coming from outside. Yes indeed, we were getting closer to the lake.
Despite our side trip to Meijers, we arrived at the launch quite early. When we got out of the truck many memories returned. Some good, some bad. We have done very well fun fishing Manistee, but rarely have we done well in tournaments. Don't know why that is. It could be that many of the spots on Manistee are community holes. They get hit pretty hard in practice, and so when tournament day comes around, the fish are much more wary.
The only boat in the parking lot ahead of us was our Tournament Director Dennis Cook and his partner Bruce Mitchell. We greeted them and stretched our legs. There was just a wisp of a breeze, and it seemed that this might be a good day to fish. Josh and Kasey pulled up along side of us, and while we were chatting through his truck window, we saw a familiar face walk past. It was young Nate Shine. It seems he was subbing for Chris Mieras who is ill, and won't be able to fish for a while. Harry Swank has pulled in a "ringer."
It was decided that I would make the draw for take off this week. Brent just wasn't feeling lucky. I pulled out number 3. Maybe our day was improving. After Dennis had a quick meeting, we readied our boat and got in line to launch. We had made the decision not to prefish Manistee mainly because of the cost of gas. Because of that, we elected to fish the same ole spots we had from years past. We started off pretty good and by 9:00 a.m. we had our limit in the box. If we'd had brought ANY food, I'd have made his lunch. It's a tradition with us that whoever catches the fewest fish by lunch time has to make sandwiches.
When we decided to start up the big motor and take a run up to Seng's, all we could get out of the old girl was an idle. The night before we found a crack in one of the ignition coils, and just by touching it, it must have opened further creating a big miss in the motor. Well, since we are use to being broke down, we decided to just fish our way around the lake. Despite our motor problems we were lucky to catch fish early and continued to catch fish and culled up 4 times. We estimated 12 plus lbs., and hoped that might be enough for money.
When we got our boat out at the launch, there were Mr. and Mrs. Brauneck. Momma B had a big bowl of homemade peanut butter cookies. Guess she read my last guest blog.
As many of the anglers passed by on the way to pick up their trailers, there was a lot of grumbling, and it wasn't because we wouldn't give them a cookie. It seems two and three fish catches were very popular. As Dennis and the guys set up the table and scales, I made my way to the waters edge to get ready to snap some pics. As the guys came down and we chatted, I observed that only about half had limits. But you always have that team that finds the mother lode.
This week that team was none other than the Traverse City boys, Brian Macdonell and Wes Herndon. These two long time Tear Drop competitors are really going after it this year. This makes the third tournament in a row that they have placed and taken money.
And this time the money came from toting 5 nice fish to the scales weighing in at 16.05 lbs. That was one of the largest Manistee Teardrop weights in quite some time. With the $500, and the $200 for bringing in a 5.06 lb. largemouth for big bass, and it gives you quite a lot of mattress stuffing. Brian told me that he caught the big fish in the first half of the day on a tube. He also said that they needed every hour of the day procuring their limit. That goes to show it doesn't matter when you catch em, just as long as you do. That win put Brian and Wes into first place for the AOY race sporting a sweet 8 pt. lead over the second place AOY team of Machiela and Weener. Congrats guys!
Second place went to my favorite team, Brent and I. The mixed bag of fish that I always make Brent carry to the scales weighed 12.48 lbs and put $250 in our pockets for what I'm sure will be boat and trailer repairs.
Third place this week goes to the team of Larry King and Bob Hamilton. I looked up previous articles on this body of water and these guys took home money the last two times the Teardrop fished Manistee. Their 5 fish limit pressed the scales to 10.96 lbs for a payday of $120 plus the
Na-Tah-Ka dinner cards. Good job guys!
Fourth place went to Dennis Cook and Bruce Mitchell. These guys started out just yards past the launch and ended up the same place. This must be their favorite spot. Dennis and Bruce brought in 5 nice fish weighing in at 10.92 lbs. and they won $50 to help toward gas money.
Rounding out the last money spot was that ringer I mentioned earlier. We passed Nate and Harry around mid day while they were perching for a smallie or two over one of the many big slab piles. Harry said Nate was matching him fish for fish. Harry and his partners are no strangers to taking home cash on Manistee either. Nate and Harry brought 10.67 lbs of Manistee bass to the scales for a $50 paycheck.
There was also a package of Lunch Money lures that went out to Danny Warner and Wes Skinner for catching the second biggest bass weighing in at 3.86 lbs.
A big thanks to this event's sponsors,
JC Marine and
Ice Mountain Water .
The next Tear Drop event will be on Portage Lake in Onekema on July 10th. Hope to see you there.
Last but certainly not least, I'd like to give a shout out to Chris Mieras. Keeping him in our prayers and wishing him a speedy recovery.
Until next time......keep a tight line.
Another great article by our Texas bass master Nick Vawter. Thanks Nick!
One of the problems I am having to deal with is making sure I get the right names with the right pictures that Nick takes. Not having fished the Tear Drop in a while, I don't know the new guys. I am going to post the pictures and take a stab at names, and hope that if I get a name wrong someone will email me and set me straight.
Well, here is a strange thing. I just took a break to walk out to the garage to check the batteries that were charging in my boat. As I was standing way in the back of the garage, I looked out and thought I saw smoke up in the tree tops. I thought maybe my neighbor was burning trash or something, but it just didn't look right. I walked out of the garage and found a large oak that had smoke pouring our of the trunk about 15 feet off the ground!
I hollered at my wife to come out to the garage which is about 75 yards from the house. We both were mystified as to how the tree could have caught fire. It did have an area at the base of the tree that was hollow. Maybe someone out walking flicked a cigarette in the hollow, or maybe the other night when we had a line of thunderstorms blow through that lightning stuck it causing it to smolder and eventually start burning.
Well, I ran and got all the hoses that we owned and hooked them together while contemplating whether I should call the fire department. I was able to get enough hose together and began spraying around and inside the tree. It was a large oak, and it had a crack that ran 20 feet up the tree. The smoke was pouring out the upper part of that crack. Thinking that I would need to cut the three down to really put the fire out, I called Rick Skinner to see if he had a chain saw handy. Rick said that he was heading this way on an errand and would bring the saw.
It didn't take him long to get here, but by the time he did, we seemed to have the fire out. Rick took a look at the tree and said that with it being hollow, it would be a tricky cut. As I said, it was a very big tree and it was close enough to my garage that we didn't dare drop it.
Rick knew the man to call. In fact, he is an advertiser in Tear Drop flyer, Ranier Porter. He comes highly recommended by Rick. If you need a tree taken down or roof repair I would think he would be your guy to call. We called him, and he said he'd have to come and see this mysterious tree that was on fire.
It didn't take him long and he was circling the tree to try and determine how he would have to fall it. He gave me his opinion and a price and tomorrow he's coming with his boom truck and will cut this mighty oak down.
Our freaky oak fire. You can see the crack where the smoke was coming out.
Well, that was an unexpected couple hours that took me away from finishing the blog. All that I have left to do is put up the pictures from Manistee, and here they are.
Half of the winning team at Manistee, Brian Macdonell. Where was Wes?
Second Place at Manistee, Nick and Brent Vawter
Third Place King and Hamilton-half the team anyway.
Fourth Place Sunday, Dennis Cook and Bruce Mitchell
Half of the Fifth Place team of Swank and Shine, Nate "Number 3 Son" Shine
Kasey Kuyser of the team Myers and Kuyser
Cadillac's Doug Sprik
One of three Skinner boys fishing the Tear Drop, Ricky Skinner Jr.
The good looking Skinner, Wes Skinner.
Jesse Weener and Ross Machiela
Manistee's own Jeff and Fred Brauneck
Kyle Bonter and John McMichael
Brian Tagg
Justin Brown
Allen Pike
Well, that's it for today. The company is now gone and after the wedding tomorrow, I should be back to blogging more regularly. Remember to check the Northern Open stats. It'll be interesting to see who may be going to the Classic.
June 23, 2011I wanted to cover some things I've been meaning to get to before I went to Alabama, however, with the Tear Drop anglers fishing Manistee this Sunday, I needed to get Nick Vawter's story and pictures up from the Crystal Lake event. So here is guest blogger, Nick Vawter's report from stop number two on Crystal.
2011 Tear Drop Tournament Trail
Crystal Lake, Beulah, MI
June 12, 2011
Written by Nick Vawter
Fred and Jeff Brauneck clean house on Crystal
Wow, if Dan edits and retypes this article it will be the start of my 3rd season of writing. Which also means it's Dan's third season of not writing Tear Drop articles. If you wonder what he's been doing with all his spare time, the last weeks of blog entries will let you in on it. He travels the globe as much as I do. He just got back from Marshaling the last Elite Series event down in Decatur, AL on Lake Wheeler. He's put a bunch of pictures, and wrote an account, for each of the four days at Wheeler and has put them on the blog. Check it out.
Just a quick apology to the guys who placed and took money on the first tournament on Missaukee. I wasn't able to do a write up after the event because my back, with its bulging vertebrae, put me out of commission. I could hardly move without intense pain. Sitting was the worst position, standing while fishing was the 2nd worst position. However, catching fish permitted the pain to subside a little. I just need to do more of that. Enough with the preface though. Here's the rest of the story, from Crystal Lake.
The second stop on the Tear Drop Tournament Series was Sunday, June 12 on
Crystal Lake in Beulah.(When the map of Crystal Lake pops in, you will need to scroll down to see the lake.). Beulah is in
Benzie County, which is in Michigan's Great Northwest Corner.
Crystal lies just a stones throw from Lake Michigan, and it's the eleventh largest inland lake in Michigan at 9,869 acres. It has about 20.8 miles of shoreline! It is a deep cold water lake catering to species that like the depths and cold water. If you want big smallmouth, this is the place to be.
The ramp on Crystal is at the end of
Clark St. , in downtown Beulah, at the extreme east end of the lake. This ramp is a bugger! (The DNR is currently working on a new ramp mid lake on the south shore of Crystal.) If you back in too far you hang up on the end of the ramp. The ramp is steep which makes it very tricky when you try to put the boat on the trailer. It's painful to hear your boat trailer scraping and grinding on the concrete. Also, if the wind is out of the west with any force, waves can easily swamp and sink the back of your boat while trying to get it on the trailer. Parking is also tough at Crystal. If there are more than a handful of boats you have to park behind the downtown stores, and walk to the ramp.
The ramp, as it turned out for us, ended up to be the least of our worries Sunday. My partner, my son Brent and I bought a 2000 Basscat Jag earlier this year. We didn't have much opportunity to get to know her before the fishing season began. We thought our only challenge, to start our season with the new boat, would be getting to know the electronics. We spent several hours checking them out. Seems it may have been a more prudent thing to inspect the wheel bearings!
We left our cabin early enough Sunday morning planning to be the first one at the ramp. As I said, parking is at a premium there. However, when we stopped for gas and ice, at about 4:00 a.m. in Baldwin, Brent noticed a smoking right rear wheel.
With no tools, we borrowed two crescent wrenches from the night shift girl at the Wesco station. Have you ever tried taking a wheel off with a crescent wrench? Just let me say it takes a tad bit longer! Our plan was to take the wheel off, and limp to the launch on 3. (The boat has a tandem four wheel trailer.)
Finally, we left the parking lot, however, we only made it about an eighth of a mile when the remaining tire on that side blew. We dragged the boat back on the rims to the lighted Wesco parking lot, and there we pondered our options.
By now it's pushing 5:30 a.m. Brent elects to call Ron Hicks, a friend who lives north of White Cloud, about twenty minutes from us. Ron use to fish the Tear Drop, and has a bass boat, so we were hoping that he might be able to help us out with a hub and a tire. Fortunately he had a bearing set and tools, and said he'd leave right away to help us out.
I called Dennis, the Teardrop Tournament Director, and he said as long as we checked in with another angler to get our livewells checked, that we could fish if and when we arrived.
Well, after,another long hour, we were back on the road. We arrived at the launch just after 8:00 a.m. We launched and headed for the first boat we saw. It turned out to be Skinner and Stumbrie. We lifted our lids, they checked out our livewell, and with grease from head to toe, we finally headed off to fish.
We were able to put our limit in the box by 10:00 a.m. We were feeling much better about showing up two hours late. We culled up a couple times during the day, ending up with just under 19 lbs. We've never done that well on Crystal. Living as far away as we do, we seldom get to prefish it much. We had an inkling though, that if we had caught 19 lbs. that easy, winning money might just take some bigger fish than we had in the livewell.
Fred and Jeff Brauneck took first place and big bass on Sunday. They brought in a whopping 23.54 lbs. of smallies. Jeff let me in on what made them so successful. He said that he and his dad caught a couple of nice fish first thing in the morning that were just cruising the shallows. Fred was throwing some plastics, and Jeff was throwing a top-water. They moved out to the drop for a while waiting for more fish to move in on the beds. It had turned cold Friday before the tournament, and a lot of fish pulled out of the shallows.
Jeff said they literally threw the kitchen sink at them Sunday! They used tubes, cranks, dropshots, jerkbaits, and an assortment of texas rigged plastics. They picked off a couple of four pounders out deeper, and then moved back in to do the bed fishing thing as the sun popped out.
Jeff caught the six pounder, and Fred had one that was close to 6 lbs. as well. They culled four or five times throughout the day. They caught probably twenty keepers total. For all that chunking and winding, they hauled in $525 for first place, and $210.00 for that 6.10 lb. big bass. Hopefully, that will make Momma Brauneck happy, and she'll bake cookies and bring them to the next event in Manistee, the Brauneck's home water.
Second place went to one of the new teams of Justin Brown and Jerry Johnson. Jerry told me he lives REAL close, and was disappointed that he didn't have more weight. But their 23.08 lb. sack of smallies won them around $262. It will ensure they have enough for a tip at the
Na-Tah-Ka , because they also won two free dinners there for taking second place.
Justin Brown and Jerry Johnson
Third place this week went to the team of Dan Warner Jr. and Wesley Skinner of Ludington. Dan knows this lake pretty well. If you study the stats, like I do, Dan and his pops took 3rd place here last year. Dan and Wes weighed in a very nice bag tipping the scale at 21.72 lbs. which won them about $131.00 and some good Classic points.
Dan Warner Jr. and Wes Skinner
Coming in fourth was Brian MacDonell and Wes Herndon of Traverse City. Their five fish tipped the scales at 20.57 lbs. These two guys are always where the smallmouth roam. My camera messed up and I didn't get their pic, but I know Wes is okay with that. They took home about $65.00 for their efforts.
The final money spot this week went to Ross Machiela and Jesse Weener. These guys were in the money spot for the second event in a row. Their fish weighed in at 20.15 lbs. That sack netted them about $65. More importantly it keeps them within two points of the leaders in the AOY race.
Ross Machiela and Jesse Weener
That's it for the money places at Crystal. If you didn't have over 20 lbs. you weren't in the hunt this week, and that's twenty pounds of smallmouth! Before I put this piece to bed here are some more pictures.
Alan Pike and Jack Kowalski
Brent and Nick Vawter from Wyoming, MI
Kasey and Josh Meyers
Ryan Van DeBurg and Doug Hall
Matt Kaiser and Dave Yeager
Doug and Paul Sprik
Harry Swank and Chris Mieras
Brian and Steve Tagg
Bruce Mitchell and Dennis Cook's son.
A very special thanks to the sponsor of this event,
Timberwolf Furnace Co. Please be sure to check out the Tear Drop flier on the main page, and give the folks listed there the first chance at your business. You won't be disappointed.
The next tournament is on Manistee Lake. Watch for the Brauneck's to put a smack down again on their home water. They have been waiting for 3 years for the Tear Drop to return to Manistee.
Until then...keep a tight line.
Thanks Nick for another great report from the Tear Drop Tournament Trail. Son number three is going to fish a few of these with Harry Swank. Chris Mieras has not been feeling well. Let's keep him in our thoughts and prayers, and hope he feels better soon.
