Tourney Fishing With Your Better Half

It's the end of January. The time of year when spring fever hits me like a 60,000 pound garbage truck and there is zero sign of spring in sight! At this very second my spring fever is getting smothered by tiny white flakes falling from the sky. (I might be ugly crying right now... Don't judge!)

There is just always so much that I look forward to in the spring. The heat, our boat, the cabin, THE FISHING!!

Oh, the fishing!! I can just hear those beautiful Walleye whispering my name under the ice. "Dayle, I'm waiting! I'll be your 13lb tourney winner! Just feed me some Kit's Tackle Glass Minnows and I'm all yours!" Ha!! I know I'm crazy. You can feel bad for my poor husband. I mean really, you should try being married to my crazy ass!

Speaking of my husband, me being crazy and fishing, that reminds me of my absolute favorite spring and summer activity: WALLEYE FISHING TOURNAMENTS!!!

As of today, we are four months away from our first tournament on Fort Peck Reservoir at Crooked Creek and I can hardly wait to get on the water. Just me and my oh so sweet and patient, not OCD at all husband. (WINK, WINK!)

Really though you guys. Eric and I look forward to these tournaments all year long! It's like our getaway vacation together as a couple, we get to be in the boat all day by ourselves together fighting about which fishing spot to go to, how deep to troll, which tackle will make those ten pounders strike hard, getting snagged on the bottom and him asking me 500 times if I'm on bottom. You think President Trump wants to build a big wall, you should imagine the wall I threaten to build down the middle of our Ranger when he's constantly leaning over my shoulder asking me what I'm doing and if I'm on bottom and when I do have a bite, it's "SNAG IT!" right over my damn shoulder!

It's a really romantic time! I really don't understand why more couples don't fish competitively together. If you don't fish Walleye tournaments with your husband you are really missing out!

You guys. I'm kidding! Yes, Eric and I have our moments or an hour or so when we want to throw the other one overboard with a 10 pound weight attached to our feet, but we actually make a really great team and love fishing together. As much as we give each other hell, we have a ton of fun and have done really well together. Being parents of two awesome, but very energetic little girls we don't have a lot of time to spend together by ourselves so we love being able to have the whole day and sometimes the weekend together to hang out and chat without our two little crazies running around. It's just us and hopefully, the big Walleye we catch in our boat for 8 hours. It's awesome! I know some of you are probably reading this thinking, "holy shit. This girl is off her rocker. I would never want to spend 8 hours in a boat all by myself with my significant other with no cell phone service and no where to pee except off the side of the boat. This chick is out of her damn mind." Remember I already warned you that I was nuts.

It's all part of the fun, and even when we want to kill each other we look back and laugh about what a shit show we were and how much fun we had together. Last year at the Rock Creek tournament on Fort Peck the first day was so windy and rough that I was hurling everything in me off the side of the boat all day and couldn't get it together long enough to actually try and catch a fish. I was a hot mess. Even though Eric felt a little bad for me, he wasn't real impressed that his partner sucked. We only caught a few pounds of fish that day and were sitting at the bottom of the barrel. When your as competitive as we are that does not make for a fun day. But, the next day we had an amazing day! We had to grind it out and it was a long one, but we ended up with 30+ pounds of Walleye and went home with 12th place overall. Now we look back and we laugh at how miserable and dumb I looked slumped over in the boat all day trying to keep from turning inside out!

Good Partners

We make good partners because we are total opposite personalities and we balance each other out. He can tell me to suck it up and get my shit together while I can tell him to quit acting like a drama queen and just fish. I swear, sometimes he acts like he needs a Valium sandwich when we aren't catching any fish!

On the flip side, he makes me a better fisherwoman. I'm pretty new to this whole Walleye gig, so he's great at making me aware the details that I would otherwise not give a rip about. Even when he has to remind me a hundred times. He's also awesome at explaining anything and everything to me from structure on the fish finder to pitching jigs. I'd love to get better at pitching because we have caught great fish this way, or I should say Eric has!

Those things work out pretty well for us and they transfer over into our everyday life too. We've learned a lot about each other fishing these tournaments over the years and it seems like we just keep surprising each other and pushing the other one to do better.

It's been an awesome ride so far and I can't wait to do it all over again in just a few, hopefully, short months!