Fool-a-Fish





Sunday, January 25, 2009

Texas Classic Bass Club January Tournament on Lake Travis


I fished the Texas Classic Bass Club January Tournament over the weekend on Saturday at Lake Travis. Well the tournament didn't go as we had hoped, but we still had a great time. I didn't get to prefish which didn't help since I didn't have a real feel for what the fish were going to be biting and where they were staged.

Here's how it went down.

At 6:00 AM I met up with my partner for the tournament Regan Vaca at Mansfield Dam Park on the lake. Weather was very cloudy, temps in the upper 30's, and wind blowing 20+ mph. We launched and headed out to Cypress creek to start our trip, only we had a few near misses on the way. The lake is very low, there are islands and points where there would normally be water. I tried running in the dark by GPS map and it was a little scary looking back. I ran up in very skinny water twice before making it to Cypress creek. Last time I go running up the lake in the dark like that again, just not worth the risk. We started fishing and the first point we visited didn't have any active fish on it. We moved into the marina where I caught a white bass and two short large mouth bass, but the wind was blowing to hard to fish in there effectively. We went back out and tried some bluffs, but came up empty. We moved out onto a point and I picked up two bass on a drop shot that were about 13 inches long. We fished around the point and Regan caught our first keeper Guadalupe bass on a water melon jig. I caught five more bass that were 10 to 13 inches long in this spot on a c-rig with a 4 inch watermelon senko. We moved out and fished some more bluffs and points with very little success. I decided to leave Cypress and head up to Devil's cove. Once we got in there I switched to a cotton candy colored jig I'd made that I thought would be good for Travis fishing. After about five casts I caught our second keeper Guadalupe bass of the day on the jig. Several casts later I caught another keeper Guadalupe bass, so turns out the jig I made was pretty good. :-) Regan caught a two more short bass in the mean time while fishing docks and I caught our 4th keeper Guadalupe bass of the day. Unfortunately, I'd lost one of the jigs earlier and later lost the second jig I'd made. I tied on another jig, but wasn't able to get a bite the rest of the day. We hit a few main lake points with no success and that was it for the day. Fortunately, the ride back to the ramp was a lot less eventful since the winds hand lessened down to about 10 mph and we could see where we were going.

Tournament in Review:

Post frontal conditions are the worst fishing conditions, but we managed to put four keepers in the boat, which I consider a success regardless of the out come. The official results haven't been posted yet, we were probably in the middle of a 9 boat field with 3.3 lbs. First place had a successful trip throwing gold rat-l-traps early in all the wind and were able to catch two 4 lb bass.