I wasn’t sure how it was going to work out down there at Andong because of the weather. It rained a lot, but we had a blast anyway. A few of us got down there early for the practice-fishing, and it rained like hell all morning. If you’ve never been hit in the face with rain while going 70 mph on a bass boat, let me tell you, it hurts! We caught some nice fish on Saturday, and worms seemed to be the trick. I lost a fish on a spinner bait when it snapped my line and another on a topwater when the fish spit it out after a brief drag-ripping bout. We ended up catching about four 3 lb bass and some smaller ones. Mr. Pak did a lot of dicking around with his tackle while we drifted out to the middle of the lake. I couldn’t cast to anything so I just had to wait and be patient. He spent a lot of time talking with his buds out in the middle of the lake too, but other than that it was fun.
Sunday was a different story… my partner, Mr. Im Mu-Tek, a no-bullshit professional, hell-of-a-nice-guy, and friend of Mr. Yeom’s landed a 6 lb bass within the first 5 minutes using a wacky-worm. 10 minutes later he landed a 4 pound-plus. He hooked me up with some hardware and showed me how to rig it with a weight in the head, but I never caught any on them all day. We did, however, notice something spooking the bluegill at the end of a cove. I tossed in a topwater popper, twitched it a couple of times, and a 4 pound bass inhaled it! We couldn’t believe it. We had at least 14 lbs of bass in the live-well and hadn’t even been fishing 30 minutes. I picked up a small 2 lb’r again on a topwater plug and that was it for the day. Bummer. We took 5th place and I finally got to stand on the big podium in front of my friends. We missed 1st place by 600 grams. Not bad for not having a limit. Im received some money, and I received a nice trophy and a $200 NS-BlackHole Shot Gun spinning rod. I had a great time. It was good to see some of the same folks from last year’s tournament. We made some new friends, learned some new techniques, caught some nice fish, barbequed a bunch of food, and drank a lot of beer up at Halmoni’s house. It doesn’t get much better than that.
Nomad, I don’t know if it’s my computer, my settings, or something on your end, but the little “thumbnails” in this post — both on your home page and in the dedicated page — take a very long time to download, as if each of the thumbnails is downloading as the full-size file.
Anyone else?
Yep. First one’s 3 megs or so.
Hey, How did Tbone and Alan do ?
Joe, if I can figure out how to send email from T’s phone I’ll send you a picture of the fish that he caught. He didn’t weigh it but that sucker was HUGE. Alan did not go.
Great pics GAR!
Did Ron catch anything? I see him recieving an award.Was that for catching a fish or telling the best fishing story?
The page should load faster now. I resized the pics and made the images as thumbnails linked to the original pics.
Gar,
I was wondering if the weather was affecting you guys down there – looks like everything turned out ok after all. 600 grams…man, you should have found one of those nets and grabbed a carp or something out of it to make up the difference
.
Wow Tbone caught a fish! Thats like one a year now! Thats why he is a Bass PRO
Joe, Ron did not do too well. He didn’t catch anything and was with the #1 pro from last year. I beleive there were two other Americans from Taegu who placed 3rd and 4th though.
Nomad he should have pushed some lead sinkers down its throat.
A trick Rob taught me.
LOL Joe. And yeah, T caught two real nice fish on practice day.
Joe,
Haha…lead sinkers
. That is why Rob is a true professional 
.
Why do you bother with line and lure when you have access to explosives?
You could’ve kicked arse in that comp.
I prefer GILL NETS.I can select all the big ones.
Every pic posted I look closely at the fish for signs of Netted fish marks.
How would I know this .Rob taught me .
I believe he is banned from most fishing events in korea.
You guys are a trip.
Yes, the weather sucked, but the rain-gear negated any real discomfort. Andong overall is getting worse each time I fish it. They killed everything (again) this tournament and it really broke my heart. If I see that one more time I will never fish KSA again.
I was talking with T-Bone, Ron, and Yeom last night and we discussed a lot of different ideas to include maybe kicking off an independent club with tournaments involving some of our Korean and American friends. Yeom quit KSA because of the backstabbing and petty bullshit, probably stemming from jealousy. If you’ve never met Mr. Yeom, he’s a hell of a nice guy and a great fisherman. He wants to plan an ocean trip soon with 5 or 6 of us and promises we’ll catch sea bass up to a meter long. It’ll cost about $120 each and we’ll leave at 2AM. Anyone interested?
Joe,
I know you’re teasing, but it’s wasted on T-Bone because I don’t think he even knows about the Lost Nomad. I think you’ll be surprised when you return at how far T-Bone has come as a fisherman. He doesn’t claim to be a Pro. Alan is the Pro. T-Bone’s learned a lot this year from the Korean Pro’s though I can tell you that. Ron caught a couple of fish in the first 30 minutes, but they didn’t have a limit and they were all small, so they threw them back. Go figure, the only fish that survived on Sunday. Get your butt back here so we can quit talking about fishing and go out and do some.
BTW, the photo with me and the two Korean guys with our thumbs up… The one on the right is one of the Oh Bros from FTV. The Koreans treated him like he was a movie star… Seemed like a real nice guy.
Tricks of the trade my friends.
“Andong overall is getting worse each time I fish it. They killed everything (again) this tournament and it really broke my heart.”
By worse, do you mean less fish being caught? And your second statement…they don’t practice catch and release? During a tournament?
Nomad,
Last year anyone could catch 4 lb bass without having to drive 6 miles on the water, and you could catch a lot of fish over a weekend. Now the fishing is really slow. Professionals are fishing for 6 hours and only catching a couple of fish. This was Bill’s 4th weekend out there and he’s only caught one fish total. Two weeks ago I caught about 6 fish all weekend. You can catch big ones, there are just fewer of them than there used to be.
I’ve noticed the KSA (supossed)Pro’s don’t respect the bass. They just toss them in the water after weigh-in and could care less if they lived or die. I hate that.
They have killed all the bass the last two tournaments under the pretext of studying them. I say B.S. You don’t have to kill every bass to do a study. You could take a few samples. I tried to release that 6 lb’r but they wouldn’t let me. They said I could eat it if I wanted to though. WTF?
hey Gar ,Did they kill the fish?
And…
I’m out there having a great time and marvelling at how well everyone is getting along, regardless of their political views, and I’m thinking “this is a good thing… all is right in the world.” Then I see shit like mistreating bass and I think, “Nope, still the land of the not-quite-right.”
Damn, that’s too bad. BTW, In my bluegill post I mentioned that a couple of Koreans were out there with dropshot rigs and caught over 20 bass in less than 2 hours…they may have had more than that because they were already there fishing when I arrived. They kept every one of them and took them along when they were picked up in a boat as it got dark. I’m hoping that they took them home to eat and didn’t end up showing someone how many fish they caught, then threw them away.
On another note – not sure if you’ve ever been to the bait store with the fish tank outside but he’s always got a tank full of bass. Last time I was there, he had a bass that must have been a good 6-7 pounds (they said it measured 58 centimeters). yeah, it’s nice to see that Idong does have some lunkers but you and I both know those fish are in that tank for advertisement to lure customers into buying tackle and those fish are going to die pretty quick. 15 bass in a 50 gallon tank doesn’t cut it. What a waste.
Do you guys remember the controversy surrounding bass fishing at Andong earlier in the year – between the netters, KSA and the local government? Not releasing the
carp-munchingnon-native bass may have been what KSA offered up just to be able to fish there. If so, wouldn’t that be like cutting your own throat? wtf?