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On 29th September I was fortunate to be invited by Scott McAuley, who I have fished with socially on quite a few occasions, to partner up with him to fish the 2020 Venom - Lake Awoonga Open.

The competition was made up of three sessions, one on each of Tues 29th Sep, day two on 30th September and the final Day on 1st October with each session being 8hours long from 2pm to 10"00pm.

I jumped at that opportunity and quickly got about putting arrangements in place overnight freeing time up, preparing gear, working out with Julie what I would eat over the next three days and generally getting my act together.

30 teams each of two members registered for the competition and when I looked around I had no doubt in my mind that I was probably the least experienced Barramundi angler of all those fishing in the competition. Scott on the other hand is a very experienced "mundi" angler and has a very strong competition history. Also, Scott had pre-fished Awoonga in the proceeding couple of days and had formed a plan which I was delighted to fall in place with.

One bay (Bay 1) had produced fish for Scott in his practice sessions and he was keen to start our competition fishing in that bay.

Just on the matter of boats I think that 24 of the 30 boats were American Skeeter type bass boats most with top speeds up around 100kph. We on the other hand were fishing out of Scott's boat which is a well decked out Quintrex 5 meter hornet with a top speed around 50kph. The other interesting thing was that for the first sessions boats were sent off one by one in the order they had paid their registration ... you guessed it that meant that were were the last boat to set of and 24 much faster boats had set of before us. Unfortunately anglers in two of those faster boats had a similar ideas to Scott and I and as we were in a much slower boat to them they both got to that bay earlier than us. We had discussed a couple of back up spots so we worked through them occasionally going back and checking if Bay 1 had been abandoned by those competitors that had beat us there. Quite late in the session we saw that Bay 1 was now empty so we moved in there for the balance of the session and fished it as hard as we could. I couldn't buy a fish but Scott got us on the board in session one with two fish. As it turned out not a lot of fish were caught in session one and Scott's two fish gave us a third place for the first session.

The implication of that was interesting because in the second and third session boats started the session in the order of their placings. We watched carefully as the 2 bass boats before us headed off and we were chuffed when we saw that only one was heading toward Bay 1. We went to a bay short of Bay 1 where I hooked two fish and landed on ... not a big fish but we were on the board for session two. We saw the boat that had beat us to our Bay 1 so quickly relocated there for the balance of the session. By about 8pm we had a 5 fish card full so we worked hard for upgrades. By the end of the session I had boated 4 barra, including a solid 90cm model which was the largest fish for the session and Scott a further 3. That gave me three fish on the card for the session and Scott two. When we checked the placings in the morning it seemed that a lot of fish had been caught in session two and we had dropped down to fifth place.

When we headed off in the third and last session two of the boats in front of us headed off to Iva and two shout up toward Bay 1 where we wanted to fish again. We hung back where we could see Bay 1 and were chuffed when the boat that had beaten us there headed off somewhere else. Even though it was quite early in the session we moved into Bay 1 claiming it for our own for the balance of the session. It wasn't until about 7pm that we had our first hit and that was a small fish. Any way we slogged it out for the duration of the session and managed just two fish each with our largest fish being a 92cm barra for me which I think may have been our last fish for the session and comp. Our 4 fish card for session three was enough to hold out final position for the comp at fifth.

On reflection, given that there were not huge numbers of fish caught in the competition I think we did pretty well and I put that down to:

• Sticking as much as we could with Bay 1, it accounted for all but one of the fish that finished up on our card.
• Fishing on balance fairly slow.
• Sticking with baits that we both had confidence in.

Definitely looking forward to our next competition.

Many thanks to Scott ... I had a wonderful time and learned so much.

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