Naymie Owns Winni, Femiak Owns 2011 AOY

Well, Winni 2011 is in the books and the 2011 season has come to a close. Only seven anglers made the trek north but it was a beautiful couple of days to fish for those who came up on Friday to pre-fish too. The drawback was that, while the largemouth and smallmouth bites were both on on Friday, a high pressure system came through on Friday night and shut things down by mid-morning on Saturday. The skies lost their haze and thin cloud cover, and the wind really picked up and blew in the opposite direction from the prior day. Several guys who started out smallie fishing had to change it up and chase largemouth later in the day. By then even the largemouth were tight-lipped.

Changing up paid off for the first and second place finishers, Fred Naymie and Mike Caudle, respectively, after they found some good brown fish early. Freddie's mixed bag of 13.53 was the biggest bag weighed by anyone in the club this season and bested second place by over two pounds. It also contained the event's lunker, a 2.84 smallie, and a largemouth of nearly identical size. Mike's bag had some nice smallies too, though his best fish was dead and couldn't be weighed for lunker. Third place went to John Boudreau who had a limit of largemouth weighing in at 7.33 pounds.

This tournament decided the final outcome of the Angler of the Year for 2011, with Eric taking the honor back from 2010 champ Mark Donovan. Eric's title is his 5th in 8 seasons! Eric, who had two first place finishes and a second, edged out Paul Carvalho who had another strong season. This year saw a new overall unweighted points leader, as Ed Doyle topped all anglers with 2616 points before his drop. Even after his drop, Ed finished third overall. It demonstrates how beneficial it can be to fish all of our events, since standings and fish-off qualifications are determined by points and not overall weight or number of fish.

No records were threatened or broken this year, tournament- or lunker-wise, with only 5 bags over ten pounds weighed all season. The AOY winning weights are continuing their downward trend. In 2005 69 pounds was caught by the AOY. Since then the weights have been 55, 50, 46, 56, 48, and this year, 31 pounds.

Our next tournament kicks off the 2012 season and hopes of better — and hopefully bigger — things to come. After our hiatus we'll likely be back on the water at Mashpee-Wakeby on October 1.