Texas Classic Bass Club June Tournament on Lake LBJ

I fished the Texas Classic Bass Club June Tournament over the weekend Saturday on LBJ. There was near perfect fishing weather a little cloud cover and 80 degree temps. Water temps in the 80s and water clarity was about 3 inches or less on the upper end. The lake is fishing very well lately. I fished with John Magee from the club.

The Tournament:

I woke up to the sound of the alarm and heavy rain on Saturday morning. John and I met at 4:30 AM at Whataburger and grabbed some breakfast. We downed breakfast and hit the road talking about fishing. We took 1431 out of Round Rock out to Marble Falls which is a very bad idea considering it was raining. Remember I said it was raining when I woke up, well it must have been raining for most of the night and there is a low water crossing out in the middle of nothing on 1431 about 10 miles outside of Marble Falls. John and I were talking about fishing and I was driving the speed limit - 55 to 60 mph when we round a corner, started down the hill and we could see three sets of head lights. We didn't really know what was going on until it was to late, In seconds my headlights were shining on what looked like a white water rapids flowing over the street and three vehicles on the other side in various stages of turning around to head back to Marble Falls. I hit the breaks long enough to realize we were never going to stop before hitting the water and decided it was better to step on the gas. We were very blessed, because it was by Gods mercy that we planed across a very swollen and swift running creek with out any trouble. There were any number of things that could have gone wrong, but didn't. It took us a while to get past the experience and disbelief before we joked, "At least we had a boat with us." We arrived at the boat launch on the Colorado River bridge about 6:15 AM in the morning which put us a little late, but very thankful to have made it. :-)



We idled across the lake to the first spot I wanted to fish and set to work. It didn't take long and John caught a small white bass and we missed a few strikes. We worked our way down the bank fishing around boat docks. I caught two large mouth on back to back casts that were about 13 inches long. A few docks and 10 minutes later I hooked into a small bass that wrapped up on something in the water and broke off. We saw the bass jump a few minutes later with my spinnerbait hanging out of his mouth. While I was rigging up a new spinnerbait, John made a long cast with a spinnerbait to the bridge pilings and caught our first keeper bass about 14 1/4 inches long. On his very next cast to the same spot, he caught a 4 lb drum. We decided to run up the lake and try some other areas. We caught a few more short fish fishing waterwillows and docks before we decided to return to the first set of docks we started on. John flipped a shakey head watermelon worm under a dock and set the hook on a 2 lb fish making our second keeper of the day. We moved on from there and hit all the bridge pilings over the next few hours and caught a bunch of small fish using various lures.



At one point I switched to a small crankbait in a shad pattern and set the hook on a bass. My initial reaction to the bite was, "Fish on." John asked, "Need the net?" "I don't know how big it is," or something like that. After a very brief and uneventful struggle the monster rose to the surface and showed it head long enough for us to see it was big. The fish dove and disappeared into the murky water and I shouted, "Get the net." John's response was something like, "Oh yeah! You're going to need the net for that one." The next few seconds seemed like minutes before it came back up and slide into the net John had waiting. High fives all around and we probably looked like those guys on Saturday morning TV. We guesstimated the weight at 6 to 7 lbs. We continued catching small bass for the rest of the day until time ran out for us. We loaded up the boat and trailered around to Cottonwood Marina to weigh in the fish with 20 minutes to spare. We decided not to launch again and just let the tournament time run out.


Tournament in Review:

We think we caught about 25 bass or more over the day. Most of the fish were caught on a white spinnerbait and on crankbaits, but we threw a lot of different stuff that caught fish as well. John and I caught three keepers going 9.42 lbs putting us in 1st place. I also took big bass honors with a 6.3 lb bass to anchor our win.

Special Thanks:

Thanks go out to my family for letting me take part of the Fathers Day weekend to do some fishing. Also thanks go out to John's Fiancee for letting him take a break from wedding and moving plans to go fish with the TCBC gang one last time. Good luck and best wishes on your future John!