Pair of tourney winners

Well, I finally have results for you from the Lake German Tuesday Nite Walleye Tourney that took place July 14.

Nate Brunz and his teammate Andy (see below for more on Andy) pulled off the win, weighing two fish for a 10 pound, 8 ounce stringer.

Brothers Tom and Ken Davis finished second with one fish weighing in at 6 pounds 4.6 ounces. This also happened to be the big fish winner on German, which netted the pot money for big fish from East Jefferson. If you'll remember, the field was skunked at Jeff and all prize money carried over to German.

Third place went to the team of Troy Bessman and Steve Wolfe. The duo weighed one fish at 4 pounds, .8 ounces.

The tournament returned to Lake Washington Tuesday. Tournament director Tim Hobbs said the walleyes weren't nearly as big as the first time the tournament hit Washington — Stu McKee and Roger Kramer edged Bill Holland and Dan Griep despite weighing one less fish — plenty of small walleye were caught.

Bessman and Wolfe pulled in first place with a three fish, 4 pound 8.4 ounce stringer. Coming in second was McKee and Kramer. They weighed two fish at 2 pounds, 3.6 ounces.

Holland and Griep weighed in one fish at 1 pound, 4.1 ounces, which narrowlly handed them third place. Hobbs said he weighed in four other fish that landed between .9 ounces (wow, that's small!) to 1 pound, 2.4 ounces.

Hobbs said he expects a full, official tally of the standings later this week. I'd been tracking the progress of Holland/Griep, Kramer/McKee closely, because early on these two teams were the teams scoring all the points. Unofficially, I have them locked at 44 with two regular season tournaments to go.

This is very unofficial, however, as points for each tournament can be awarded for just showing up, and also for just weighing a fish. And I also have a sneaking suspicion that the team of Bessman/Wolfe isn't far behind the other two teams.

More on Andy
As a journalist, I'm trained to track down the facts. If you can't verify something, you cut it out or write around it. But here on this blog, and specifically with these walleye tournaments, I'm in a unique situation.

Nate Brunz and Andy were the German winners, but Hobbs couldn't come up with a last name for Andy. And with the increasing popularity of cell phones, I couldn't find a listing for Brunz to call and ask him.

Now, if this were going in our newspaper, I'd start calling other anglers from the tournament, hoping one or the other would know his name. Then I'd call him and verify. I will still do this to make sure Andy gets his proper credit, but I don't want to short change him now by not mentioning him along with Brunz as winners of the German tourney.

So if you know who Andy is, drop me a line. If you're out there Andy, drop me a line. In the meantime, I'll do my homework.

You might wonder how this could happen since both were fishing in a tournament, but until the newspaper started snooping around the walleye tournaments, there was probably little need for Hobbs to gather last names and correct spellings and such. Several of the anglers in this year's field have said that the best thing about fishing the tournaments was the camraderie.

Several of the anglers admit knowing a lot of the competition strictly through the walleye tournaments, so things like last names don't always crop up and complicate things.

Leave it to me to come along and make a casually event just a little more formal. Doh!