SW Kayak League Report
Kevin Hopson of Crooked Creek, Ind. - 1st Place
Kevin Hopson of Crooked Creek, Ind. outpaced 10 other kayak anglers to win the SW Kayak League tournament at Magician Lake Sunday afternoon.
It was an encore performance for Hopson who took first at Corey Lake seven days earlier.
In fact, we could run pretty much the same story we did after the Corey-Harwood season opener, as Corey Breseman of Union, Mich., took second place and big fish, a repeat of his accomplishment at Corey in the league opener. In third was Steve Boekhout, Fremont, Ind.
Hopson, who won $170, focused on boat docks and pontoons, also similar to his approach at Corey, where he won with a Missile Ned Bomb on a 1/8-ounce jighead. At Magician, that lure wasn’t working nearly as well.
“It was too weedy for a Ned rig,” Hopson said. “It took me about an hour to figure out what they wanted.”
That turned out to be a 7-inch, curl-tail Berkley Power Worm, tequila sunrise color, Texas rigged but without any weight.
“I had most of my action skipping it under pontoons,” Hopson said.
Hopson culled through 15 largemouth to total 68.5 inches in the four-hour contest.
Breseman started at the mouth of Magician’s west channel mouth—a spot he fished from shore as a youngster. He caught two of his five-fish limit on a squarebill there.
“I grew up fishing the channel from shore, so I knew I could find at least a couple over there,” he said. His other fish, including the 14.75-inch big fish of the tournament, came from under docks, where he skipped a 5-inch, black with blue flake Yum Dinger on a 3/16-ounce Buckeye Weighted Wacky Hook. Breseman won $70 for second and $30 for big bass.
Third place Steve Boekhout caught his fish on a drop-shot-rigged Jackall Flick-Shake 5.8 in the watermelon candy color. He won $38.
Magician was the second stop on the Topwater Series’ SW Kayak League’s fall schedule, with seven more to go. Next up is Klinger Lake near White Pigeon on Sunday, September 25, noon to 4 p.m. Entry fee is $35, with $5 of it going to an Angler of the Year pot, and the rest paid back at every tournament. The contests are open to anyone with a kayak and use a catch-photo-release format where anglers take a picture of their catch and submit it through the free Topwater Tracker app to the topwaterseries.com website. That site tallies the standings in real time.
For more information, check out the Topwater Nation Facebook page.