First Tournament of 2013!! A Good Start with Big Sandy!

This past weekend I kicked off my 2013 tournament season with the Big Sandy Creek Bass Club and a good finish! It was kind of a spur of the moment type thing, and I had forgotten about wanting to join BSCBC until a week before the tournament. Luckily, I remembered last Sunday and found out their first meeting of the year was the next day on Monday. I went to their meeting and found out their first tournament was coming up on Saturday! Luckily, my awesome managers at Wells Fargo were willing to give me Saturday off on short notice. THANKS, STEPHEN! After some brief scrambling from the BSCBC tournament director, Bryan Cotter, we found a partner for me for the day and I was ready to fish! Thanks, Bryan! Here’s the breakdown:

Tournament Preparation

Once I found out about the tournament and was able to secure the weekend off work, I started preparing for the tournament.  The club was fishing Lake Bastrop, and I have never been to Lake Bastrop before.  I also knew that I’d have no time to pre-fish, so the plan was to just go into this one and have some fun.  Maybe I could get lucky and get a few good fish.  After having participated in a few clubs now, I’ve decided that that is really the way to approach club tournaments.  You don’t have a ton of money on the line, so just go out and have a good time.  Still though, you can have that little bit of a competitive spirit, and that’s what makes it fun.  I did some research on the lake, and even found that there were several anglers on AustinBassFishing.com that were willing to share their hotspots and insider information on the lake with me.  Thanks guys!  At this point I wasn’t sure if I was going to be fishing as a boater or non-boater, so I was doing some research on areas of the lake that I wanted to fish if I was going to be in charge.  I felt like I had a pretty good game plan, and from what I could gather, fishing this time of the year on Lake Bastrop is good.  I wasn’t really worried about being able to find fish.

Thursday came along, and Bryan Cotter told me that I’d be fishing with Kyle Jud.  I know Kyle, but we’ve never fished together.  I also knew that Kyle had some experience on the lake, so I was happy about that.  Kyle called me a short-time later and we discussed our game plan.  Kyle just got his boat out of the shop and he was ready to give it a run on the water.  I was just fine with fishing backseat for the day.  After talking to Kyle, it sounded like his game plan was pretty similar to mine.  Bastrop is a power plant lake, so fishing near the discharge where the warmer water is can always be a winning tactic on power plant lakes in the winter.  We decided to get to the lake early in order to try and secure our spot at the discharge before anyone else did.  After that, we’d start bouncing around to different spots on the lake to try different patterns and get dialed into something.  Sounds like a winner to me!

Tournament Day

I met up with Kyle at his place around 4:45 AM, so we could make the drive to Bastrop together.  Around 6 AM we were surprised as we pulled into the parking lot at Lake Bastrop to find it filled with guys prepping their bass boats to launch.  We both agreed that there must’ve been another club having a tournament that day, as there were A LOT of trucks, boats, and trailers in that parking lot.  Kyle and I jumped out of the truck to start immediately preparing to launch.  We didn’t waste any time with chatting to anyone around the ramp because we knew other guys were going to try and get to the discharge.  We hustled, put the boat in the water, and sped across the lake in the dark.  It’s a little nerve-wracking being in a bass boat in the dark on a lake you’ve never been on before, but Kyle got us there easily and safely.

As we pulled into the narrow discharge area, we could see a small, faint, white light up towards where we wanted to be.  Is that a boat or is that just a buoy light or something???  We slowly crept in to the narrow waterway leading to the discharge.  As we approached, we saw movement around the light and realized… Crap, it’s another boat.  They beat us here.  As we idled closer to the other boat, we got as close as we could while still giving them their space.  There we sat… waiting… in the darkness… until 7 AM when we could make our first casts.

As 7 AM approached, we could hear and see bass chasing shad on the surface in the faint morning light.  We had all sorts of shad-imitating baits lined up to cash in on the feeding fish and anxiously awaited the 7 AM start time.  By 7:00, there were already 3 or 4 other boats lined up behind is jockeying for position to get into the discharge should a space open to move in.  We held our ground though and played defense trying to hold off the other boats from invading our space as the tournament started and everyone began casting.

As things got underway, the fishing was definitely not fast and furious.  Even the guys who got the spot right at the mouth of the discharge, were catching one here and there, but nothing to be too jealous of.  Kyle caught our first keeper (yup, our first keeper… BSCBC tournaments are team tournaments) on a sexy shad colored crankbait that was somewhere in the 15-16″ range.  (Bastrop is a slot lake, so we had to take measurements of fish… it was a paper tournament).  We continued to grind it out in our little space for some time before Kyle caught our second keeper on a T-rigged worm.  This one was just slightly bigger at 16-17″.  As we sat cornered in this little spot by other boats, it was like we were all fighting for territory in an area that was honestly not really producing a whole lot of action.  I’m not really sure how long Kyle and I stayed there, but Kyle’s two keepers were the only fish we caught there.  I didn’t even get bit.  I think we both really wanted that spot to pay off and we kind of had a hard time deciding to give it up, but eventually we decided that we were fighting for territory that really wasn’t worth fighting over… and we left to find new water.

Our next few spots weren’t real productive either.  Kyle knew of a few good deeper offshore areas that we decided to make stops at.  Not a nibble at any of them.  After our 3rd stop, we discussed our options from there.  It was dark and overcast and the wind was beginning to pick up.  However, despite being in the middle of January, it was an unseasonably mild day in the mid 60s.  I commented to Kyle, “Today seems like a pretty ‘trappy’ kind of day to me, man.”  Meaning that I felt like the conditions dictated that it was time to start fishing lipless crankbaits over submerged grass.  Kyle pointed across the lake to a bank that he knew had some good grass on it, and I agreed that we needed to go give it a shot.

The shoreline had reeds up in really shallow water, less than two foot, with submerged eel grass growing along the slow sloping bank out into 8-10 feet of water.  There was a good inside grassline from the eel grass just in front of the reeds, and a good outside grassline in that 8-10 foot range.  As we approached the outer edge of the grass, I picked up my rod rigged with a hand-painted pink lipless crankbait.  It only took me a few casts to realize that I needed to reel my crankbait pretty darn fast in order to keep it just above the grass, ticking the tops of it.  Within 3 or 4 minutes, I made a cast up to the shallow grass and was burning the crankbait just under the surface when suddenly it was attacked and my crankbait disappeared in a giant swirl of water.  As the fight ensued, I knew it was either a good fish, or a fish carrying a lot of grass with it because it sure felt heavy!  It was a good fish.  🙂  This one measured 19.5″.

This is when we started dialing in on the fish.  Kyle followed mine up with another keeper on a lipless crank.  As we continued to fish, we soon realized we had a problem.  There was A TON of floating grass being blown around by the wind that was making it almost impossible to fish our lipless crankbaits properly.  We continued to go back and forth along this shoreline trying to get dialed into an effective way to tackle the floating grass and catch the fish we knew were there.  Kyle caught a few keepers from 16-17″ on a subsurface walking bait while I continued to experiment with ways to fight the grass.  He now had his limit, and I only had one fish in the boat.  Time to catch up.  I finally decided that a weightless fluke should do the trick and allow me to fish over the submerged grass, but not get fouled up by the floating grass.  I fished the fluke for quite a while trying to fish it at a fairly quick pace over the submerged grass with no luck for almost 20 minutes.  Finally I decided to try slowing it down.

By now the wind was blowing pretty solid, and I made a cast into the wind and peeling off several feet of line off the reel by hand to just let the fluke drift over the grass in the wind.  I let the fluke just drift around the top of the grass in the wind for probably 20 seconds before reeling down the slack to get in touch with the fluke again.  As I did, I noticed my line was getting heavier and it was moving towards deeper water VERY quickly…FISH ON!  This one went 16.5″.  Slow it down huh?  Let’s try that again.  Next cast, I rinsed and repeated… with even better results.  Once again as I reeled down the slack, my line was getting heavy and heading toward deeper water.  As I set the hook on this one, there was a huge swirl from a big bass where it felt the sting on the hook.  Once again I kept thinking… it’s either a big one or he’s got a ton of grass on the line ’cause it’s HEAVY.  Sure enough, good fish.  This one went 20″.  Boo-ya!

I kept trying to deadstick the fluke and fish it really slow just letting it drift along the top of the grass, but after about 20-30 minutes of no luck doing that, I grew impatient and started fishing it a little quicker bringing the fluke closer to the surface again.  By now we’d moved to a new area.  The quicker retrieve finally elicited a strike on a shallow inside grassline as a good bass exploded on the surface on the bait…but he missed the bait.  I gave it a couple more twitches on the surface before he turned around and engulfed it this time.  Another solid fish at 18″.

After that it got slow for a while and neither of us had any strikes for a bit.  We tried fishing offshore again for a while with no luck.  Finally we made the decision to stick out the rest of the tournament fishing shallow grass and made a run down lake to another grassy shoreline.  I picked up the fluke, fishing it quickly on the surface again, and within a matter of minutes another fish exploded on the bait.  This one made it in the boat and went 17.5″.  I now had a pretty solid limit, but both Kyle and I each had one 16.5″ fish we really wanted to get rid of.  As we continued fishing down this shoreline, both Kyle and I started getting lots of bites, but only a few made it in the boat, and none that made it helped any.  Two of the bites I had were BIG fish that definitely would’ve helped, and I think were both “overs” (a fish over the 21″ slot limit).  They both made absolutely GIANT vicious swirls on the surface as they attacked the bait, but both of them missed eating the bait.  The strikes sounded like giant toilet bowl flushes.  I’m still pretty bummed about missing both of those fish.

After that we bounced around to a couple more areas with no luck being able to upgrade our limits until the end of the tournament.  As we returned to the weigh-in site, I knew we probably had enough for a decent finish, but didn’t think we’d have quite enough to win.  Sure enough, that’s exactly how it panned out.  When all the calculations were made, we ended up with an unofficial weight of 32.06 lbs for 10 fish, enough for 3rd place.  Unfortunately, this club only pays out 2 places.  One spot out of the money.  Boo.  Second place had an unofficial weight of 33.2o lbs.  Close call.  Overall though, I am happy with that considering the fact that I’ve never been to Bastrop before.  What do I think of the lake?  I like it.  🙂

A good start to what should hopefully be a successful tournament season.  I’m still carrying that momentum from the end of last season winning the FAN Championship.