Friends having fishing tourny, any fun ideas for the format?

[ZEEK1223]

My friends and I thought it would be fun to have a little tourny on a metro lake. There will be 6 of us in 3 boats. One idea was as simple as the biggest fish wins, no specific species. Another was an accumulative weight, with no specific species. We would be using the honor system, maybe taking pictures of the bigger ones. Do you have any ideas for a fun format, that wouldnt require us to keep the fish?

[Mallard1]

Hey ZEEK, in the past we have done total inches of different species. Bass, Walleye, Northern, etc...A fun way to keep track of whats biting ! All caatch and release after a quick measure.

[Aaron Carrell]

If all 3 boats keep a scale handy, you could also do best 5 fish by weight. This could be all species even, though that might make someone go hunting for pike or muskies a little heavier.

Typically my friends and I just compete between each other for most fish in the boat over 12" (All species). Keeping track of inches is fun stuff, but just requires a slight bit more effort.

[RK]

Hiya -

A couple different ideas:

1.) Multi-species tournament with a point value for each species, like 1 pt for a sunfish, 3 for a crappie, 5 for a bass... The more difficult to catch or rare (in that body of water) the species the higher the point total. So a dogfish is worth more than a walleye, for example. Then 5 bonus pts for each species on your catch list. Tournaments like this are a riot because the more species you catch the more you rack up the bonus points, so there's some strategy involved, and someone who really seeks out off the wall fish can come out of nowhere and win. During one tournament like this, with about 15 guys, one guy absolutely *throttled* the rest of us by going out over 50 feet of water and vertical jigging for ciscoes worth 15 pts each.

2.) Have a Snoopy Rod Challenge... Everyone goes to Fleet Farm or wherever and gets a kid's fishing rod and reel combo. It has to be some kind of character - Dora, Diego, Lightning McQueen, whatever - and the rod and reel have to be one piece of equipment. No changing line or otherwise modifying the rod/reel. You have to fish it as is. We have done this for a morning as a bass tournament counting total inches in a 3 hour tournament a couple times, and it's freaking hysterical.

3.) Variation on #1, but you can do a multi-species total length tournament. Make a list of target species, and do longest of each species per team, top total inches wins.

Just some ideas...

Cheers,

Rob Kimm

[53orbigger]

Our group has a fishing contest every year on the "guys" fishing trip and we used to just use the biggest fish by inches, but as has been pointed out the person that caught the 30" pike would beat out the person that caught the 28" walleye, which is just wrong. To rectify this we created a chart that includes bass, walleye, pike, and musky that is scaled by what we felt were the trophy's for each species (22" bass, 30" walleye, 45" pike, and 50" musky). Get everyone to agree on the list and then whoever catches the fish that is highest on the list wins.

Just a thought.

53orbigger

That's all I ask!

[Bottle Fish]

Personally I think RK nailed it on both ideas. If you do the Snoopy Rod Challenge I would go with Sponge Bob or Lightning McQueen. I have great success on both of those models personally. You might be surprised on what you can catch on one of those. I have had some real lunkers on them.

[Gopher_Man]

We have done a couple before including most weight, the problem is that can be a lot of fish and we had to keep some because they didn't survive.

Now what we do is pick two or three species and limit it to one of each selected species per boat, then take total length. All fish are measured with witnesses and then released.

Last year we did Pike and Bass. Funny thing was winning team was only team that caught a bass. Bass was 15 inches Pike was 28 inches.

Fun and neat way for us without harming or keeping a lot of fish.

[mainbutter]

when we go fishing with the family, there are always 50 cent bets on first fish, biggest fish, most fish, and ODDEST/MOST INTERESTING thing caught(by majority vote, bet is nullified if nothing of particular strangeness is found)