It was 11 p.m. and I was loading the Expedition with all my tournament gear. I 'd just gotten home from a late-night shift at Red Lobster when I decided that I would just pack up my stuff and head down to Lake Okeechobee to practice for the third BFL of the season. I opted to just make the trip that night and sleep in the Expedition.

I finally got everything packed at around midnight and was on my way. I grabbed a Monster energy drink and a Cuban sandwich from 7-11 and made my way down Highway 441 toward the "Big O" while blasting Pink Floyd the entire way.

It was a good ride to listen to "the Floyd," too. The 441 is long and dark, and songs like “One of These Days” and “Echoes” seemed to fit the black, quiet countryside perfectly.

I finally made it to the Lake Okeechobee Wal-Mart around 1:45 a.m. where I had a history of sleeping in the parking lot. I blew up my mattress, made my nest and was out.

Friday: Practice

I woke up to an orchestra of semi-truck generators and the glowing lights of Wally-World. I was ready to go, and I soon made my way to the Okie Tantie launch ramp.

My plan of attack for this practice day was simple: start in areas that had a strong wave of spawning fish earlier in the year and work my way out toward the main lake from there, covering a lot of water in the process. My goal was to find those little stretches that were holding the majority of the post-spawn females.

I hadn’t been on the lake but once since the FLW College Fishing event in February and I wasn’t even going to fish as far south as the Monkey Box, where my partner Len and I fished that event.

The one day I had been to the lake after the FLW College event, I basically drove around and covered a lot of water to find areas that had potential, so I broke my practice into three general locales: the J&S area, the Kings Bar area, and Indian Prairie canals and the surrounding grass flats.

I decided to go to the J&S area on the east side of the lake to start. I found one spot real quick that was absolutely beautiful. Clear water, hard bottom, littered with abandoned beds, mixtures of hydrilla, isolated pads, bulrushes and cattails and it even had a smorgasbord of baitfish everywhere. It was absolutely textbook!

But the bass weren’t reading the same book, apparently.

I broke down the area like I usually do during practice – I worked from the outside edge in, covering as much water as possible until I started getting the right bites.

I found that the bite was still strong on the Skinny Dipper and a Zoom Magnum Speed Worm, but the fish were small. Though the right ingredients were there, and if I slowed down and fished more deliberately I could have caught some decent fish, there just wasn’t enough for me to want to make the run over to the area on game day. I latched everything down and pounded my way southwest toward Indian Prairie.

When I got there the wind was coming from the east/northeast and it was creating a subtle windblown current down the actual canal. There was also a thick edge of hydrilla growing on the side of the canal, so I picked up a Strike King Red-Eye Shad and started throwing parallel to the grass edge.

Not surprisingly I caught two fish within 4 casts, with one weighing about 3 pounds. That wasn’t great, but I knew that I could come in and catch some decent (non-squeakers) fish during the tournament if the wind did what the weather people said it was supposed to.

After that I started working my way south, covering water with the Speed Worm. Unfortunately I didn’t find anything strong. However, I found one area that had the right ingredients along with the right-sized fish – the biggest one I caught from it was about 5 pounds.

The area was in between the canal and a huge spawning flat where I had found the fish 2 weeks previously, so it was a perfect transition area. The reason it was really special was because it was the only spot in that area that had clear water, and although it was surrounded by topped-out hydrilla, inside the area it was relatively open with sparse hydrilla and abandoned beds everywhere.

What made it even more special was the two patches of bulrushes inside the area were choked with matted hydrilla and hyacinths, so it had the correct mixture of water clarity, open feeding/spawning pockets and ample heavy cover for stressed out post-spawners. It was the last transition area from the main spawning flats to the canal, and the fish were going wild back there.

However, the area was very small, and though I knew it had major potential, I also felt that without something else, I would be trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t find anything that I felt confident enough to spend time on during the tournament, so I headed out to the Kings Bar area.

I spent several hours on the western side of Kings Bar and found some good areas, but nothing that I felt great about. I did, however, find one stretch on the tip of the bar that had a thin line of hydrilla and eelgrass bordering the cattail line, and even though there were plenty of fish there, I didn’t see the quality I wanted.

I got off the water at 5:30, called FLW to check in and sat in the parking lot of Okeechobee Fishing Headquarters and rigged my rods.

After the registration meeting I met up with my partner, Johnny Dease. I told him to bring his “gam face,” and some Speed Worms, and then caught up with my buddy Jim Folks and headed to the homesite.

Jim offered me an outlet for my boat and a place to park. He also offered the couch in his buddies' place where he and two other competitors were staying, but I decided to just grab a shower, hang out for an hour with the guys and hit the Expedition.

Saturday: Competition

The next morning I caught up with Johnny at Okie Tantie. We launched the boat, checked-in with FLW officials, and we were off in no time.

We got down to Indian Prairie without getting beat up too badly, and I stopped for a few minutes to throw a lipless crank down the edge of the hydrilla in the canal. The water had dirtied up quite a bit since the day before and I wasn’t seeing the baitfish action yet, so we quickly worked our way to the area that I found the day before, and quickly started catching fish.

The first fish I caught was an 8-inch dink that just annihilated my watermelon-red Magnum Speed Worm. On the next cast I caught a nice fish that was a smidge over 4 pounds.

I pride myself in being able to break down an area to maximize the number of bites I can get, so we slowly worked our way around the place. I had my limit in about 20 minutes, though none were very big other than the first keeper.

My partner was having a tough go at catching the fish, but he caught some pretty quick as soon as I let him know they were pretty picky about the color, and that watermelon-red was the only color I could catch them on as good as I had.

After I thoroughly covered the area with the Magnum Speed Worm I picked up my broom stick and went to work sweeping up the area by flipping the mats in the two patches of bulrushes . The last two times I'd been on the lake, including the previous practice day, I hadn’t gotten a bite while flipping some of the best cover in the lake, but my gut was telling me that I should give it another shot.

It took me about 15 minutes before I got that first bite, and I swung in a solid 2 1/2-pound fish. I was relieved that I could catch them flipping because I knew these bulrush patches were excellent bus- tops for the big fish.

After we covered all aspects of our key area I decided we needed to let it rest awhile, so we started making our way south to see if there was anything else we could find. I caught another 2 1/2-pounder, but after about an hour and a half I decided we needed to go back and fish our main area one more time before we moved to the canal for the final hour.

I ended up flipping up another 2 1/2-pounder that culled a dink. I then grabbed a Clif Bar and a Powerade and I was ready to go again.

Johnny and I had both culled several times in the area, but I felt I had covered it thoroughly enough, and the wind and sun were just perfect for the canal bite to be on, so we headed out. With the water stained like it was, I started throwing a gold Rat-L-Trap with an orange belly and began catching fish.

I probably caught 10 fish in the canal within that hour, including a 3 1/2-pounder that culled out my last fish under 2 pounds, and Johnny caught about five fish, including some decent ones that had him culling a couple of times. We ended up leaving the area about an hour before our check-in.

We fished a little in the Kissimmee River, but didn’t catch anything that helped the cause. My five-fish limit ended up weighing 15 pounds even and I finished 22nd out of 124 boats – just barely making the money.

Overall, I was happy with my performance. My practice was pretty bad. I really didn’t have much to work with, but one thing that I've learned here in Florida is when you find an area with fish and you've caught some decent ones in there, it's often best to just work an area thoroughly instead of running around and trying to make them bite elsewhere. That isn’t always the case, though, and you have to know when you should and shouldn’t run and gun.

In this tournament I feel that though I wasn’t on anything special, I made do with what I had. I'll take my check, put it into my tournament winnings account, and hopefully put together something stronger next time.

Miles "Sonar" Burghoff is a student at the University of Central Florida and an aspiring professional angler. He writes a regular column for BassFan. To keep up with his exploits on a day-to-day basis, follow him on Twitter and Facebook.