We're at the Florence, AL marina and this huge 150ft. motoryacht is here too. For comparison, that's a 49 ft. DeFever LRC in front of the big yacht.

As we were approaching the marina on the way here on Friday, we saw lots and lots of bass boats out in the river fishing for bass. Kathy thought that maybe there was a bass fishing tournament in the area somewhere..... It turned out to be a huge regional tournament at our marina! The tournament was Friday and Saturday and the top 6 boats will go to the Nationals.

This was Saturday morning about dawn and there was too much fog to let 180 bass boats go zooming around on the river, so they were all sitting in the marina at docks and around the big motoryacht. Every one of them had HUGE motors for small, flat fishing boats so they could zoom to a next spot, fish, and then zoom to the next spot. It's kind of like frenzy fishing with so many boats.

When the fog cleared, they released them in waves, set to come back at certain times.











When they came back in, each contestant had a standard bass bag to carry up to 5 bass they had caught to the weigh-in.











They stood in line for less than a minute with their live bass and then an official poured out the water leaving just the flopping bass and the standard bag for the weigh-in.







They weighed the bass and announced scores (this guy came in 6th for the two days, I believe). He had about 14 pounds of bass in 10 fish over 2 days. The biggest fish was about 5 lbs.






Then they put water back in the bag and took the bass to this pontoon boat that had a very large tank installed on it. The pontoon boat ran down the river releasing the bass into the main channel current over a few miles of river.




My boat project for the day was to replace the starboard side windshield wiper motor, which had burned out on the way here. Luckily, Sam's Marine had an original 32 volt wiper motor so I could replace the burned out one fairly easily (if you call 3 hours easy).


We have our own car here, so we'll go exploring around Florence in the next few days. Kathy has a number of places she wants to go, but I doubt if we'll get down the list as far as the "Alabama Coon Dog Cemetery" wherein the National Champion Coon Dog is interred.