Today was the 2nd annual Westren Outdoor News Southern California Trout Opener held here at beautiful Irvine Lake. With the lake nearly at full capacity it could accomidate the large amount of tournament entries both companies hoped would show up and show up they did. Over 700+ tournament anglers from all over the state came to the lake to ply the waters for trophy trout and tagged trout. Before the tournament over 200 trout where tagged by W.O.N, Irvine Lake staff, and Calavares Trout Farms for this contest. With prizes ranging from sponsers swag to $5,000 this tournament had some serious prizes!
Probably my favorite thing about this tournament is that there is lot of diffrent divison's that way there are a ton of winners. Those divisons where as follows: Adult male, Adult female, juniour male, and junior female. The prizes for each of the previous mentioned was a beautiful trophy.
From the get go I could tell the fishing was red hot for a lot of the people who came out to the lake today. The line at the scales was long and had tons of people with full stringers.
A lot of fimilar faces where in line too. Here is the infamous dou that trolls at mach 30! So at 10mph a Rapala should dive to 35ft according to this card Lt. Maverick.
The tag team of Big Daddy-Huggybear makes there way to the scales.
The tournament director Bill Egan hard at work weighing fish.
Elaine Dickernoff with her tagged fish that would eventually put her near the top of the Ladies division.
Allsiun Fuchs walked away happy with a full stringer and placing in the juniour female division.
Rusty Vogl of Hunigton Beach managed this Brown Trout weighing in at 1.65 while fishing a Kastmaster in the flats.
Adrian Baccera with his 4.0 Rainbow that would also put him in the top 5 of the Adult Male division.
However, it would take a truly giant fish to take the big trophy home. John Gobert of Carson found that giant fish! John's giant rainbow weighed in at 12.03 and ate natural corn powerbait!
Now for the raffle and what a raffle it was! Look at the amount of people at this raffle!
Here are the big Sports Chalet winners. Thank you Cindy Neagle and your staff for everything!
Emio Leveniea with his brand new kayak!
Mr. Toida with his prize pack worth over $1000 in Sports Chalet goods.
The Junior Female divison winners!
Sorry I did not get photos of the other groups due to a camera malfunction.
Here are the winners and in each divison.
Adult Male
John Gobert 12.03
David Huynh 5.53
Tim Blackster 4.21
Adrian Baccera 3.67
Adult Female
Catherine Gobert 3.71
Frances Moore 3.42
Elaine Dickernoff 3.24
Linda Elmun 3.08
Jr Male
James Moore 3.09
David Estrada 2.88
Reggie Walter Jr 2.72
Marcos Ingles 2.67
Austin Harvey 2.63
Jr Female
Raquel Alcala 2.65
Marcey Cambell 2.61
Kaela Braneny 2.60
Melinda Camell 2.48
Allsion Fuchs 2.39
I would like to thank you all of the staff of W.O.N for putting on such a great tournament. I would also like to thank all of the sponsers of this event. Finally I would like to thank all of the anglers that participated and camped out for this event. I can harldy wait to see the spread that W.O.N. puts out for this event. Look for that supplement here shortly! Cant wait til next year on this event!
Jimmy