Texas Classic Bass Club August Tournament on Stillhouse Hollow.

I fished the Texas Classic Bass Club August tournament on Stillhouse Hollow with Don Steussy, 5:00 to 2:00 on Saturday. We got fourth place, and had a great time fishing. The hot Texas summer weather made for some tough fishing conditions. The wind was calm and still all day, but you couldn't have asked for better topwater fishing conditions early in the morning.

The Tournament:

AT 4:30 AM I met Don at the Rivers Bend boat launch. Normally the ramp isn't open till 6:00 AM, but the club had registered the tournament with the lake authority. We loaded his gear in the boat and headed off to our first fishing spot. There wasn't much moon light, it was pretty dark. I decided to follow a boat that zoomed past and seemed to know exactly where it was going out behind the island. Turned out it was Bryan "Snakeman" Cotter on the way to the same area I planned to fish only he didn't exactly know where he was going. We ended up dragging the bottom somewhere in the darkness near the island. We laughed at each other while we deployed our trolling motors and push polls to find our way out to deeper water. I made it out of the shallows first thanks to my trusty Maxx 80 trolling motor. :-)

We moved out on to the grass flats in 4 feet of water and went to work. Nothing happened for the first hour of the tournament and then around 6:00 AM the action picked up. I caught our first keeper in the dark on a spinnerbait. Several cast later I caught another keeper on the spinner bait and the fish hit it so hard, it knocked the skirt off and bent the arm 90 degrees in the wrong direction. I didn't have another one exactly like that with me on the trip, so I had to go with the next closest spinnerbait, but it turned out to be, not close enough because I didn't get another bite on a spinnerbait despite all attempts.

About 8:00 AM a lot of topwater action scattered around us started happening, so I switched to a clear top water chugger and started catching bass along the defined grass edges. By 9:15 AM I had caught three more keepers and started culling, but none of the keepers were helping much. At 10:30 I decided to slow down and go for the bigger bite in a attempt to get our kicker fish. I tied on a black/brown jig rigged with a red shad Eager beaver. We flipped the deep grass for about an hour and I set the hook on a 14 inch keeper. We kept working the deep grass with jigs and C-rigs till about 11:30 and noticed schooling bass out in the middle of the lake. They are schooling on small shad in 30 feet of water. We threw all the standard schooling lures I've always had success with on Stillhouse and they wouldn't touch any of it. I don't feel bad though because there we three other boats out there and no one caught any of those fish. You could see them on the surface chasing the bait. Some of the bass were good size fish, but none would bite. About 12:15 we switched to punching through matted grass around trees with deep water near them. Don set the hook on a big fish only to have it wrap up in the grass around a tree limb and pull off the hook. We spent the rest of the tournament trying to get another big bite in the matted grass, but no takers. The water was clear enough that I did see a bass that was pretty big cruising around the grass edges, but it spooked about the time I saw it.

Tournament in Review:

The sky was clear and sunny all day with very little wind and water temps were 85 to 88 degrees. We probably caught two limits of keepers, with a five bass total for 8.78 lbs. We caught about 15 bass all day long and had a great time. The majority of our fish were caught on clear top water baits and white spinner baits.

Special Thanks:

Thanks go out to Kelly, Landry and my kiddos for camping out with me on the lake before the tournament. Also thanks go out to Austin Boats and Motors for getting my 20 hour service done quickly and installing my new sonarGPS the LMS 334c.