Gerald Lim

So I called up Captain Jesse to ask if he could take me out for a couple of days to show me around the lake so that I would have an overall idea of what I was dealing with. We arranged the time and I did the 8 1/2 hour drive up to Lake Powell three weeks before the world championships and spent a couple of days with him learning the lake, the ins and outs of competition there, tactics, and how to prepare the boat for the world championships. It was extremely useful for me and more importantly I think I made a lifelong friend. It was such a fun 2 days with Jesse and now I had some basic preparation. After that I spent a couple days scouting on my own in my tiny little 10 HP 14 foot dinghy on this really big lake. Jesse advised me to stay in sheltered areas but I didn’t exactly heed his good advice because I REALLY had to scout all the areas to get a good idea of the lake. It’s a huge lake, and that’s a really small boat, and it was scary at times.

The arrangement originally was for teammate Ken to fly in from Hawaii just before the Championships and we would scout together. Unfortunately, he had a last minute situation crop up where he had to move homes during that same period. I had to start scouting on my own while he was desperately trying to move his family into a new home. So I drove up five days before the championship to scout 2 days on my own before Ken joined me for the final 3 days of scouting . As I looked around the lake with the information I had gathered from Jesse I found more promising areas, more fish, and then critically, the day before Ken flew in, I was checking out a bay and saw a whole bunch of splashing in the shallows and recognized what I was looking at. It was a carp spawn and this was a critical piece of the puzzle! So I started to look for more similar areas.

That night I had to drive down to Las Vegas to pick up teammate Ken from the airport. It would be a nine hour round-trip drive and he arrived at midnight. By the time we got back to lake Powell it was already dawn.

In the meantime, our secret weapon had arrived. Long time friend, fellow fisherman, hunter, and experienced boat captain Brian Williams had arrived with his fishing boat to be our captain. Captain Brian would turn out to be an absolutely vital part of our team even though this was his first time at the lake.

Since we were already up, Brian, Ken, and myself decided to go straight out and scout the lake without having had any sleep that night. We would spend the next three days desperately scouting for game fish and more carp to shoot for the meet.

I showed Ken and Brian the carp spawning area and immediately Captain Brian started looking at the charts. He found other similar areas which also turned out to be carp spawning areas, so straight off the bat Brian was really showing his value to the team. Scouting the next few days it was becoming apparent was that game fish – striped bass, walleye and catfish – were really hard to find repeatably. In fact, we were beginning to wonder if we would be able to catch any fish at all on the first day (game fish) day. We found some fish but it wasn’t a lot and it was not very predictable. Captain Brian even found gamefish in some of our carp spots! But at the very last hour of the last scouting day Brian brought us to this one bay where we found all 3 types of game fish in good numbers: stripers, which would come in and out of the bay, walleye which were hanging around the brush piles and catfish, which could be basically anywhere from the shallows to the deeps. The catfish seemed to be looking for places to spawn too.