I got to have a lot of fun last week. It started off with a good day of catching Lake Austin bass on a buzzbait ALL DAY LONG. I recently received my new tournament jersey in the mail (finally!). The turnaround time on orders from Rayjus may take a long time since they are so busy, but their work is pretty darn good. I think my jersey looks great. So the first order of business was to go out for the day on Monday to hopefully get some new photos and GoPro footage while wearing the new jersey. It couldn’t have worked any better. I had an awesome day catching around 30 keepers and the vast majority of them were on a buzzbait. Topwater action all day long! Doesn’t get much more fun than that. I got some great photos and some great GoPro footage (keep an eye out for that footage soon!).
Then on Thursday it was time to head up to Lake Waco in order to scout it out for the upcoming TTZ tournament next weekend. I tried to not be TOO concerned about actually finding fish since we have a week off-limits period, and a lot has a tendency to change in a week, but rather, I wanted to tour the majority of the lake since I had never been there before. I was able to run probably 80% of the lake and get a feel for it. There’s lots of shallow wood and rock. I personally didn’t find any grass. Not sure how much I like the lake, but I’ll have more of an opinion after next weekend. After running the lake, I spent a few hours trying to catch a few, but with pretty limited results. I ended up just catching a bunch of dinks. I will do my homework this week and see if I can come up for a good game plan for the tournament. With the week off-limits period, we will need to find the fish during the actual tournament anyway. After wrapping it up on Waco for the day, I drove to stay the night in Belton, TX, in order to fish Stillhouse Hollow the next day.
I woke up on Friday morning just 15 minutes away from Stillhouse Hollow Marina ready to spend the day pre-fishing for the Media Bass tournament the next day. I’ve fished Stillhouse just a few times in the past, but it has been at least 3 years since I’ve been out there. A lot of tournament organizations stopped holding tournaments at Stillhouse because nobody wanted to go there. It earned the nickname “The Dead Sea” due to it’s notoriously tough fishing and small bags. I guess no more than like 7-9 years ago that place rocked and kicked out 30lb bags on the reg, but after big flood it killed off all of the grass and the lake took a turn for the worse. Anyways, despite that, I was looking forward to it because I figured after 3 years the grass had to be making a come back. And making a come back it is! When I launched my boat that morning and tied up to the dock, I looked under the dock and BEHOLD! GLORIOUS HYDRILLA!!!! After spending the day pre-fishing on Stillhouse, it’s looking awesome. There’s plenty of good grass growing in several areas and good, clean, clear water. I had a decent day catching lots of keepers, but the bigger fish were definitely a little harder to come by. I hope I get to visit Stillhouse more often in the near future despite my sucky tournament day you are about to read about here.
The game plan for the tournament Saturday was to go fish a big tree-filled point that I had found that seemed to be holding a lot of fish in order to catch a fairly quick limit. One side of the point had an awesome ledge on it, too, that dropped from like 5ft to 20ft. Some good potential for some big fish to hang-out in that area I figured. After that, I should have almost all day to try and focus on solely catching a big one. Of course, it didn’t work out that way. I made a few passes around the point with faster moving baits (topwaters, spinnerbait, and swimbait), with just 2 short strikes. I figured I’d make a milk-run to a bunch of other smaller rocky points really quick while it was still early and cover water fast with a River2Sea Rover topwater since I caught a few better fish doing that the morning before. I hit up probably 6 points in the next 45-60 minutes and only caught a dink spottie. At this point I figured, well, I guess it’s gonna be a grind-it-out kind of day. I ran back to the tree-filled point I started on and got ready to settle in to do some timber flipping. I pulled out my Ardent Denny Brauer Flip & Pitch rod and reel with my PowerTeam Lures Texas-Rig Jig and got to work. About 10 minutes later, I hooked up with my first decent fish. It was a small keeper, about a pound and a half, but it got wrapped up in the tree about 6 ft down. I desperately spent about 15 minutes trying to get that fish out of that tree and I could see him clear as day down there pinned up against the branch. While doing this, the wind was blowing pretty hard straight into this point and hitting my boat into this timber pretty hard. This is where things turned ugly. Since I was lying down on the deck reaching as far as I could into the water to try and get this fish out, the wind was pushing me into the trees hard and my trolling motor steering cable broke. I had no control over the boat anymore. The wind eventually blew me away from the fish, and with no t-motor steering, I couldn’t stay on top of it and had to break off the fish. Well now what the heck am I going to do?
At this point it was about 9 AM. I sat there in my boat for about 5 minutes feeling pretty defeated and trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I had to try and make the best of it. I tried tying off to a tree or two on the point and tried to flip some trees, but it just wasn’t getting the job done. With no anchor in the boat and no PowerPoles, I needed to find someplace where I could just make drifts with the wind. I decided on a bank with a series of shallow points and flats that had large scattered patches of grass on them. I caught a few fish there the day before and figured if I’d gotten lucky I might be able to scrape out a limit and at least get some decent points to help qualify for the championship. I figured my best shot was to just stick with a T-rigged 7″ PowerTeam Lures Finicky Tickler and make long casts as I drifted and just bring it through the grass. I spent the rest of the day doing this. I caught a lot of fish, but it was hard to come by keepers. I ended up weighing-in 3 keepers. I had one fish jump off that looked like a definite keeper plus the one I broke off in the tree that caused this whole mess, so I had my 5 keeper bites. Oh well. It sucked, but I guess it could always be worse. Whatever the case, like I said, I’m totally digging the look and feel of Stillhouse currently and hope that I have an excuse to get out there again soon.
So the week had a bit of a bitter end, but overall, it was a lot of fun. Like I said, keep an eye out for some upcoming GoPro footage!
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