So we had our annual church fishing derby again today but after dealing with the mayhem of the Redondo boat launch last year, we decided to launch at Pt. Defiance and fish the south part of area 11. I double dipped so we also entered the Gig harbor fishing derby too! We launched at 4:45 and headed down away from all the boats that were already on the water and started trolling toward the old slag pile in about 120' of water using a Brad's cut plug and Ace hi-fly with my own leader tied on. Tons of bait on the surface but no takers for the 1st hour or so- started at 25 and 35 feet and moved down after witnessing an amazing sunrise to 45 and 55 feet. Got 1 shaker about 18" just past the ferry so thought things were looking up but didn't get another take so changed out to a Irish cream coyote spoon with the hootchie skirt on it and a cookies and cream spoon. We were trolling back past Owens beach and I decided to drop deep since there were over100 boats out and the sun was shining bright so went to 85' and 95' in 125 feet of water. No sooner did I get the Irish Cream down to 85' that it started bouncing so grabbed it thinking another shaker but when I popped it off the clip she started ripping line! yahoo! fish on!! my boat partners did a great job getting things ready to get her in the net and after a couple nice runs had our 1st king of the day.

Not a monster but at least we had something to weigh in for the derby so after a bathroom break we headed up to the Clay banks but boy was it packed and had a tough time navigating with the currents around the point so decided to just keep fishing between the boat launch and Owens beach.

At noon decided to call it a day because for some reason I thought we had to run to the Narrow's marina to weigh my fish and wanted to be back in time to get the boat home, grab the wife and be back to Pt. Defiance for the bbq and awards. Now comes the fun part!

Granted my fish weighed in at 7.24 lbs and was not even on the charts when they started giving out the awards but about half way through it they announced they were going to do a drawing for the mystery fish so the top 3 winners came up and picked 3 weights out of a bucket and they said they were going to take the average of the 3 to determine the winning weight of the mystery fish. Much to my surprise my name was called and won the prize! So I ran up thinking I was going to get to pick some prize off the table and the master of ceremonies said for me to come up on the stage as they had a check for me. $500 !!! and to top it off my number got called later in the raffle and picked up a nice pair of binoculars donated by West Marine. So all in all a great day so that is why I gave I rated it so high even though we only caught 1 fish.

oh by the way, I tied for 1st place in our church derby too since only 1 other fish was caught and both weighed about the same so we split the 1st and 2nd place money!

I entered next weeks derby too so see you out there on the water!!

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