Boy, that sounds good and reads awesome in print. This was the 11th annual GWP tournament sponsored by Gary Pongracz in honor of his father “Mr. Walley”. Gary works endless hours with a lot of help from family and great friends to make this one of the most successful tournaments and parties in OH. There are great prizes, awards, awesome food and drink and a lot of comradery among the teams.
I have had a lot of accolades since the win with the team of my sons Ryan Yonkers, Jason Yonkers and me “Old Captain Moses”. I love fishing with my sons, and yes it was the Yonkers team, but I want it to be clear who the team leader was. I couldn’t be prouder than to say Ryan was that guy. After doing all of the homework (pre-fishing) with his son and my grandson Kaya, his brother -in-laws Cole, Leif and their cousin Kris Carlson (who finished 5th that day), he figured out what our program was going to be. We used his Ranger boat, his equipment, his lures and boy did he grind it out. My heart fell to my stomach when we lost a fairly large walleye that we didn’t even get to see at the back of the boat. He sucked in the disappointment and carried on. The next fish was a monster and we all knew it was 30 plus inches. This would put us back in the game until yours truly knocked it off with the net. By this time we were getting reports of teams putting together decent boxes of tanks and we had one 27″ that wouldn’t qualify that day. Ryan kept his cool, at least that’s what we saw on the outside but he had to be feeling miserable inside. Well, we showed up and giant coolers were already turned in with 1st place being 149.75 for their five fish. When all was said and done, we had the only 150″ cooler which averaged 30″ for our 5 fish. You can’t get cocky when so many great fisherman were within an inch of our catch. It could have as easily been one of the other teams. Thanks and congratulations for a great win Ryan, for leading the way and not giving up. Better to be blessed and lucky than to be good.