Well I managed to end the 2015 Big Sandy Creek Bass Club season on a good note, but not good enough. I knew I’d have to show up with a really big bag in order to pass up the two guys in front of me in the AOY race. I was actually seriously shooting for 25 pounds for me to feel like I had a shot, but I certainly fell short of that goal. However, in shooting for a big bag, I did manage to get the largest bag of the tournament. In my mind, that’s a win. In case you are unfamiliar with how BSCBC runs their tournaments, the pay-out for the tournament is based on your overall weight as a team (your 5 fish, plus your partner’s 5 fish). However, the AOY points are based on your own individual bag. Considering the fact that the pay-out for a club tournament is pretty minimal, I never focus on trying to place first as a team. It may sound selfish, but I am only concerned with my own performance and trying to rack up as many AOY points as I can. That doesn’t I won’t help my partner try to catch fish, but this is a tournament, not a guide trip. I’m not about to give my partner my rod and reel while I sit down and let him try to catch fish if I already have my limit. Once I get my limit, I’m still going to grind hard to try and cull my limit up. Ultimately, it’s not my responsibility to get my partner to catch fish. That’s his responsibility. So anyway, I had the largest individual bag, and we placed second as a team.
Here’s a lit breakdown and report about how this tournament went and how I caught ’em:
Pre-Fishing
Yeah, I pre-fished for this one just a little bit. Often times I don’t have time to pre-fish for a club event, but I did for this one. I went out once about 10 days before the tournament and once the day before the tournament. It’s kind of hard for me to consider going out on a lake 10 days beforehand “pre-fishing” though. So much changes over the course of 10 days and trying to rely on what you found 10 days prior to a tournament usually does you no good. However, it can be good to just keep in mind how you caught them, but still focus on the conditions at hand come tournament time. The first time I went out, I found a pretty solid pattern catching better quality fish throwing medium diving crankbaits on the rocks lining the power plant intake canal. Once that slowed, we managed to catch them fishing a little deeper on the rocks with Texas-rigged worms.
Pre-fishing the day before the tournament, I decided to not fish the disharge, intake, or the dam at all. Those are pretty much all places I know hold fish at almost anytime on that lake. In order to get a really big bag, I knew I would have to find some fish in some less obvious areas. I spent the first half of the morning fishing various shorelines. I caught a few fish here and there, but nothing terribly exciting that really stuck out to me as something to return to during the tournament. The last half of the morning, I spent idling around offshore and fishing a few offshore spots. I spent a lot of time checking out offshore stuff near the discharge and the intake since I know those are both areas that support large populations of fish. I caught a few fish offshore near those areas, but again nothing very exciting. After that, I started idling around the rest of the lake. Finally, just before I decided to get off the lake, I found something that stuck out to me: GRASS.
It was a small strip of offshore submerged grass that was sitting just off of a small ledge on the side of a main lake point. The ledge just dropped from about 2.5 ft to 5 ft and the grass was growing in 5-7 ft of water. It was only about 50 ft long and about 10 ft wide. Within about 10 casts with a lipless crankbait I caught two 15-17″ fish, and then in another 10 casts with a Texas-rig, I caught another fish the same size and shook off two other bites. While I hadn’t caught a big one there, I could tell that spot was holding a lot of fish, so I quickly left it.
From there I decided to just make one quick pass through the intake canal with a crankbait to see if the fish I had been catching the past week in there were still there and biting. In less than 10 minutes going through the intake canal making pretty haphazard casts, I caught two fish that were bigger than anything else I had caught that day, and 18″ and a 20″. Still there, I figured. As I headed home, I decided my plan would be to crank the obvious areas (intake, discharge, and dam) first thing in the morning hopefully before they got too beat up by other anglers since that seemed to be producing the better bites. Once I felt like I had covered that adequately enough, then I would go to the offshore grass I had found. I figured the grass was a much less obvious spot that likely no one would fish, and I could save that for later in the day.
Tournament Day
Game day didn’t work out how I planned it, but when does it ever? That’s part of tournament fishing. Rolling with whatever gets thrown at ya. We got a lousy draw and ended up being the last boat out. I figured that meant we wouldn’t be able to get into the intake first. Not to mention the fact that there were already several other boats out on the water both just fun fishing, and I’m sure there was another club having a tournament out there.
Sure enough, we went to the intake first and it was already loaded with boats, so we turned around and went to the discharge to see how crowded it was. Surprisingly enough, there was only one boat there fishing way out in front of the discharge canal. We idled up in there, and I started throwing a Bass Pro Shops Tourney Special crankbait along the rocks in the canal. After making one pass through the canal, I had three “keepers” tallied up on my score sheet from throwing that crankbait: an 18″, 16″, and 14″. (Fayette is a “slot lake” which means this tournament was a paper tournament, hence the score sheet). Not quite the quality I was catching at the intake, but it was a start.
As a side note… I’m actually pretty impressed with that BPS Tourney Special crankbait for it being a “Discount Bin” bait. Of course, I had to swap out the hooks for Mustad KVD trebles, but other than that, it makes for a pretty sweet medium diving crankbait with good action. It’s what I was using pre-fishing the day before as well. If you look at the photo at the bottom of the post here, it’s the bait at the bottom of the pic. Sorry the lighting is kind of bad and makes it difficult to see the color. It was basically a Citrus Shad kind of color.
Anyway, after making one pass through the discharge, I tied on a different colored BPS crankbait and decided to make another pass through. I didn’t get anything on the next pass, but my non-boater, Tony, caught a small scoreable bass. I decided to tie on a different color BPS crankbait and make yet another pass. This pass failed to produce a fish for either of us, so I decided to make a move and go see if boats had cleared out of the intake at all.
Upon arriving at the intake, it still looked pretty crowded, so we decided to fish the dam. We started at the end by the intake and just started covering water along the dam. We fished a pretty long section of the dam for what must’ve been 30 minutes and didn’t get a single fish. It was pretty surprising. I mean, I know it got fished pretty hard by several other boats first thing in the morning, but I can usually squeak out a fish or two behind guys. Not the case this time. By now, we had been out of sight of the intake for quite a while, so we decided to go check it once more.
The actual canal still had a couple of boats in it, but some of the boats had cleared out of some of the offshore structure just outside of the intake canal. I figured we could go fish some of that for a bit, and then we’d be in a good position to jump inside the intake canal if it freed up. We fished some of the offshore structure by the intake for about 15 minutes with no fish, and then suddenly the boats that were in the intake canal left. We hurried and scuttled in there to give it a go.
Cranked up and down the canal… nada. Figures, it seemed like it had been hit pretty hard by everyone else all morning. I decided to slow down and fish deeper further off the rocks (15-20 ft deep) in the canal to see if I could coax a few into biting that maybe were passed over. We saturated that canal pretty good for what must’ve been 30-45 minutes, and managed to each catch one small scoreable fish each on the T-rigs. Looks like the intake ain’t happening. I think it had probably just been fished a little too hard by so many other boats so far that morning.
At this point, we had been fishing a few hours and other than my small morning flurry at the dishcarge, it had been a pretty slow bite. The whole time though, I kept reminding Tony about this patch of grass that I had found the day before and that I was saving it until later on after we had hit all of the obvious areas. There was really only one other spot I wanted to try before going to the grass bed, but as Tony and I left the intake, I saw another boat sitting on the other spot I wanted to hit. I looked at Tony and said, “Ok, let’s go to the grass!” I glanced at my phone to check the time and it was a little after 10:30 AM. Awesome, we still have plenty of time.
As we pulled up to the grass bed, sure enough, there were no other boats around and I figured nobody had touched it yet. After idling past it a couple of times to see it on my side imaging and throwing out a couple of marker buoys to pinpoint its exact location, we started fishing again. I pulled out my cranking rod with the medium diving crankbait and replaced it with my favorite lipless crankbait, a River2Sea Twin Vibe. I think the color is called “Sardine,” but it’s basically chrome with a blue back. On about my 4th or 5th cast to the grass, I hooked up. It didn’t feel very big at first, but then it surfaced and I saw it was a really nice fish. Tony quickly grabbed the net, and we got it in the boat. It had that lipless absolutely CHOKED and it was close to a 6 pound fish. It scored in at 22 inches. AWESOME. I knew this was where we were going to start taking care of business.
Anyway, we spent the next close to 2 hours just going back and forth on that small patch of grass. That big one was the only one I caught on the lipless, but we caught numerous other fish primarily on soft plastic baits. We both finished out our limits on that spot, and Tony managed to add a solid 20″ fish to his bag as well. I caught all of my other fish at that spot on a Texas-rigged PowerTeam Lures Sick Stick, while Tony threw a few different plastics, I believe. The water was pretty flat calm and the sun was bright, so I think that’s why the lipless crankbait bite wasn’t working that well, and fishing the T-rigs slow through the grass produced better. I was throwing the Sick Stick on a 3/16 oz bullet weight unpegged with a plastic bead (see pic below).
After we felt like we had pretty much gotten everything we were going to get from that little patch of grass, we decided to spend the rest of our time idling around looking for more grass since that is what had produced our better fish. Tony had a few small fish in his “limit,” but I only had one small 14″ that I really wanted to get rid of. After about 30 minutes of idling around, sure enough, we found another strip of offshore grass. Roughly the same size as the one we had fished, but this one was in deeper water. It was in about 9-12 ft of water. As I idled over it, I saw a few fish on the graph suspended a foot or two over it, so I knew it had fish on it. Tony was the first one to hook up on this grass, but he ended up breaking it off on his hookset. Soon afterward, I boated a good fish that I think scored 18 inches, if I remember right, to cull out my last small one. At this point we had only 40 minutes left to fish or so, so we decided that instead of spending time idling, we would just grind it out on this patch of grass. We ended up catching a few more smaller scoreable fish, but nothing that would help our overall totals. And then that was that.
When it was all said and done, we managed to take 2nd place as a team, and I scored the largest individual limit in the club with 17 something pounds. A far cry from the 25 pounds I had set as my goal in order to have a shot at AOY, but a good finish still the same. I’ll take it, I guess. 🙂
Anyway, here’s the picture of the equipment I used to catch my fish. Hopefully I can take the good moment I had at my last couple of tournaments for 2015 and carry that into 2016!
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