When the team arrived at the Lake late
on the 27thOctober they immediately
started setting up their personal
equipment. We hired our own boats
and a big thanks to Johnson Outdoors
and Varkenelli Customs for sponsoring
three top of the range Minnkota Ultrex
112 trolling motors.
Another big thank you goes to
Lowrance SA for helping with some
of the fish finding equipment that we
took with us and used on the boats. Each boat had its own finders as well as
an HDS-12T that we installed together with our Navionics maps and our very
own Google Maps with pictures, as well as all the scanning done by Hennie
Du Preez. Another big thanks must go to Club Marine for insuring all of our
equipment.
The two official practice days went well considering the water levels had
changed and this had caused the fish to move. Heavy winds came through that
night and the organisers were forced to cancel Day One of the tournament. This
meant that the team had to change its strategy and adopt a less conservative
approach.
The anglers went into the first fishing day extremely positive and motivated.
The day was completely dominated by team USA, with all three of their boats
doing exceptionally well in 1st, 3rd and 8th places. This gave them a total of
12 penalty points. In second place was Spain with 41 penalty points and then
followed in third and fourth places were Mexico and South Africa on 42 penalty
points. Thus, one penalty point separating second to fourth places.
The highlight on the South
African side was that Justy
and Mike finished the day
with the second heaviest bag
of 14.99Kgs. (301g behind
the leading boat of team
USA’s of Scott Martin and
Scott Canterbury). Then Justy
caught the day’s biggest fish
of 4.445kgs.