Went down to Rayburn for a little fun fishing and to donate to a good cause for the weekend. We paid-up, even not having been on Rayburn for several weeks, and fished Keith Comb's benefit tournament. The results were extremely impressive, over 28 to win, nearly 21 to get a check. We certainly had our chances even though we hadn't been on the water, we had a couple nice fish dropping a Yamamoto Flappin Hog in the grass on a 1 ounce tungsten weight, I will say, incredibly impressed how well my Lew's rods and reels performed grass fishing. It's been so long since I have done much of it, I paired a BB1 Pro Speed Spool in a 7.1:1 retrieve ratio with two different rods, a 7'4" Magnum Pitching LCLMPS and a 7'6" Magnum Flipping LCLFRH. Both of these are big, meaty rods. I also for the first time flipped Seaguar's 80# Kanzen braid, super strong, super thin stuff. It appears from what we saw, and heard, that the bigger fish were out deeper, mostly on wood. We had our chances, I had two different fish, including one that felt like I hooked a submarine, that I just could not coax out of a 26' deep brush pile late in the day. Really frustrating to know that you had the bites to do well, if not win. But for zero practice, we had the bites, great fun. Also looks like the fish are trying to school some, we didn't chase them as 3 lber's don't help at Rayburn at the moment, but lots of fun if you're just wanting to go fun fishing. If you are heading down you can catch numbers around the abundant grass, I mean matted to the top, we fished from Fire Tower up the west side all the way to the Canyons, and there are acres and acres of beautiful hydrilla, a little more water, and about 60 degree water temp, and it's going to be one awesome trap bite this year!   

The proverbial question of which came first, the chicken or the egg....well in the case of the FLW Costa Texoma tournament for me last week I laid the egg. Texoma has so regularly frustrated me, and this year was no different. Coming into the tournament I sat in 6th place for Angler of the Year and put in so much work. I had multiple piles out, and tons of practice time. But even then the bites continued to elude me even up through the official practice days. Honestly Texoma is a puzzle, that I simply cannot seem to solve. It appears, from reading and talking to buddies, that what I missed was really finding the bait fish, but again, puzzeled, one I'd like to forget, but one that just bugs the crap out of me. Upside is even with a massive stumble I had such a good early  year that I stayed inside the top 20, qualified for the championship on Kentucky lake here in a few weeks, and look forward to going somewhere where I have absolutely no history, so I can just go fishing.

Took my daughter and her husband to Rayburn for a little fun fishing this weekend. First the deep bite...where is it? I have a couple of places that normally i can catch little 12-15" Kentucky's on every cast, but they just aren't out there. We could go shallow and catch fish in the grass but that's hard to do on spinning tackle for non-everyday fisherpeople. So my buddy Clyton Boulware suggested that Saturday afternoon we drive down 69 and fish the moving water in the river below Rayburn damn. Water is beautiful, 78 degrees, very large alligators, tons and tons of little Kentuckies, we had a blast. Had 3 packs of Senkos with us, went through all of them. Then broke out the H&H spinnerbaits I bought at Brookshire Bros in Zavalla, they will absolutely eat them up. If you want something different, or want to teach a kid to fish somewhere that you can get lots of bites.....the river is awesome right now. 

So apparently Santa checks his list twice...I went to Rayburn this weekend to do some scouting for the Bass Champs Shootout....and I did check the damn list, right there on top it says "Graphs"....got to Lufkin and realized that I left my Helix 12, and 1199, which is my backup, in my tackle room at home. I did remember to get the scotch on the list, but not the graph. So MoonPie (Aka Steve Evans) and I decide to fish the TABC tournament on Saturday in his boat, we launch at Hanks and make a pretty long run north and catch a limit in about 30 minutes and he notices that his livewell  (Triton, making no judgements here) has kicked off. So he goes back and discovers that they will come on for 1 second, but then the power kicks off. Over the next hour and a half he put on a very respectable show of turning the air blue while checking connections, scraping fuses, trying everything possible to get a fix. And by the way he's not just using expletives as nouns, I'm pretty sure he put an entire sentence together about an hour into his frustration using only expletives, noun, adverb, verb, and maybe even a conjunctive adverb, nothing but expletives, pretty dang impressive for a guy from Lufkin. I did learn that I can fish when my partner is working on the boat, and cussing kinda loud, and was able to cull up to 15.6 lbs by 10:00, but our ice was running low and we had a livewell full of fish so we ran back to Hanks, drove to my place in Zavalla, got my boat (with no depthfinders) and spent the rest of the day catching jack crap. Then Sunday, well kinda hard to spend anytime offshore when not only can you not see waypoints but you don't know how deep you are. Two lessons here, check the list, twice, and save your waypoints to the in dash graph vs sharing, because if they are only on one, and that unit is 200 miles away....    

 Oh and by the way if you were up Marion's Ferry area and heard the expletives, sorry.