Whew! What a crazy couple of months! I don’t know how the guys that fish tournaments nearly every weekend do it. Trying to fish two trails this year was busy enough for me. This year’s regular tournament season has come to a close with only the championships remaining to be fished in the fall. So how’d things end up? I guess it depends on how you look at it. Things got a little depressing more often than I would’ve liked it to at each tournament with not as many high tournament finishes as I was envisioning at the beginning of the season. However, when you look at the overall picture, things seemed to work out in the end.
Just like I did at the midway point in the season, let’s review each of the tournaments from the last half of the season:
Media Bass – Lake LBJ (21 Apr 2012): Honestly, I’m having a difficult time remembering much about this tournament, which goes to show it was a pretty mediocre tournament. All I remember of this tournament is the last hour of it. I can’t remember how pre-fishing went or even how / where I fished most of the day during the tournament. What stands out is that last hour. As I recall, heading into the last hour, I’d had a pretty slow, miserable day, and I don’t think I had a thing in the livewell. If I had anything, it was just one small fish in the livewell up until that point. Finally, in the last hour as I was running out of options, I resorted to drop-shotting the rip-rap on the dam. As I pulled up to the dam, the wind was howling and blowing straight onto the rocks. I pulled out my trusty drop-shot, and within 30 minutes I had put 3 or 4 keepers in the livewell and lost two other potential keepers. All of them solid 2lb fish. With 30 minutes to spare, I thought, I can do this… just one more keeper. In just those first 30 minutes, I’d already had 5-6 keeper bites. However, with so little time to left, losing those two keepers really hurt. And then that’s when it all just went to crap. In those last 30 minutes, I lost FIVE MORE keepers; all of them solid 2-4lb fish. To this day, I don’t know what happened. They’d load up on the rod, solid hook-sets, but then they’d make it to the boat, make a hard dive for the bottom, and the hook would pop right out every time. I ended up weighing in 4 fish and finished in 5th place. Outside of the money. I left that tournament pretty disgusted…
Faith Angler Network – Lake Travis (28 Apr 2012): I remember this tournament pretty well. FREAKIN’ TOUGH. Neither David nor I were really able to pre-fish for this one, so we went into it pretty well blind. David had fished in another tournament here the weekend before, but didn’t do so well and hadn’t learned much. Today would prove no different. I couldn’t believe how tough it was. The morning started off in a cove where we found bass busting shad against a couple of docks. They were pinning the shad up against the side of the docks and picking them off. David hooked about a 3lber on a senko under the dock, but it pulled off after nearly making it into the net. This would prove to be our only pattern for the day. I left the senko pattern up to David while I tried to get them going other ways. It was slow fishing all day with David picking up a small keeper here and there on the senko under docks. Luckily, David put 5 small ones in the boat for us, and I only ever caught a couple of dinks all day long. We just couldn’t get dialed into anything all day, and for some reason we were both just drained that day. Neither of us were 100% mentally there that day. We finished middle of the pack in 14th place.
Media Bass – Lake LBJ (19 May 2012): Another frustrating day. Pre-fishing for this event was awesome, and I fully expected a top 3 finish in this one. I’d done my homework for this one and scouted out A LOT of offshore spots on Google Earth. Pre-fishing, I found a pretty good frog / jig bite early in the morning upriver, and then an awesome offshore rockpile bite throughout the lake. Every rockpile I pulled up on, I caught keeper fish off of. So what happened in the tournament? Heck if I know. Started the morning upriver trying the frog and jig bite. The fish were eating shad like gangbusters in that shallow grass up there at daylight! The grass was shaking, shad were fleeing everywhere, and the bass were gobbling them up… but I couldn’t BUY a bite!!! I swear I tried everything… except of course for what the eventual winner was throwing (a 3″ shad swimbait… go figure). I finally gave up upriver, and started running to the offshore rockpiles thinking I’d get a limit EASY. No such luck. Every rockpile I hit was full of DINKS. Once again, how did I end the tournament? Running to the dam to drop-shot for the last hour. Once again, put 3 keepers in the boat, and lost one. Not as crazy as last time, but still kinda depressing. I only weighed in 3 fish and finished in 8th place.
Media Bass – Belton Lake (09 June 2012): I was kind of dreading, but also looking forward to this one. I had mixed feelings after pre-fishing earlier in the week. While pre-fishing, I had a really quick limit after finding schooling fish in the first hour of the day. They were all really small, but still, it was a limit, and on Belton that goes a long way. The rest of the day pre-fishing was very tough. I figured my best hope for the tournament was to hunt schooling fish early in the day. I found the schooling fish on tournament day, but they wouldn’t stay up on top as long as they did while pre-fishing. They’d pop up for only 10-20 seconds at a time and they kept on the move. I just couldn’t make it to them fast enough before they would dive back down and move on. It was a typical tough, hot summer day on Belton. I caught several dinks, but that was it. Typically the deal is to find schools of fish suspended in the trees in really deep water. I graphed a lot of fish throughout the day, but could never get them to go. Only small ones. Finally, in the last hour, I lost about a 2lber right at the boat that I had drop-shotted suspended in a tree in 35 ft of water. I guess I should’ve stuck with that all day and maybe scrounged out a few more bites. Since I only lost the one fish, I figured it probably didn’t really cost me much. Turned out it did, first place had two fish for 3.05 lbs. TOUGH. That one fish would’ve put me into 2nd or 3rd place and in the money. Boo.
AOY Points Results: By the end of the season, I had moved up to 4th place in the AOY standings in the Media Bass trail. Not too shabby. This means that I qualify to fish the championship tournament on Sam Rayburn in October for a shot at $10,000. Cool. However, the gas expenses alone to compete in such a tournament are beyond what I feel comfortable forking out. I want to fish it, but I need some sponsor support. The only way I’m fishing it is if I get a little help from some companies. I’ve thrown the idea around with a few people so far just testing the waters… and well, I just may actually get there. We’ll see what happens. And in the FAN trail? Well, David and I opted not to fish the last tournament of the season. It was on the same day as the Media Bass tournament, so we had to choose which tournament to fish. We decided that we were already qualified to fish the FAN championship, so missing one tournament in FAN wouldn’t hurt us. As a result though, that of course caused us to take a hard hit in the AOY race and we fell to 17th as a result.
Anyway, not the tournament season I was hoping for this year, but you can’t dwell on it. Just move on, keep your head down, and fish. You can’t let it get you down for too long. But hey, things are already looking up. I just got 2nd place plus big bass in our club tournament yesterday. I lost to David by an ounce. I’ll take it though after these last several tournaments. Hopefully this is where I start to turn it around.
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