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.

As promised last week here's what happened at Bass Champs on Toledo Saturday. As I told you in last weeks blog we made the decision to stay deep on Saturday and try to win, or at least get a top 5. So we started the day just above the Pendelton bridge on a main lake ridge that neither of us had fished in several years. Even though there was a lot of bait and what appeared to be fish eating them on our Humminbird, we left there after about 45 minutes with one missed football jig bite. I will note that as we were headed that way one of the teams that finished in the top three for the tournament headed even further north than we did, so I suspect one of the top three stringers was from the north end of the lake. We left there and went all the way to 1215 in a 10-20 mph wind, and the only thing we learned there was that a Ranger Z521 really does handle big water well....so we decided to see how it ran with a trailing sea and ran back down to the midlake area two hours in and with no fish in the livewell. We spent the rest of the day fishing 10-18 feet deep on main lake ridges from Pendelton down to Indian Mounds and were able to catch maybe a dozen keepers through the day, which is a really slow day on Toledo, for 14.7 pounds. We did see two of the other top 10 teams fishing the same areas and similar depths to what we were, mainlake, mid-depth. Interestingly the week before I caught 14 pounds and 11 ounces in the BFL, which 14.7 pounds equates to 14 pounds and 11 ounces, so apparently no matter what we do on Toledo we can't catch 15 pounds. I will say you could have knocked me over with a feather when we found out that won us $600, which is I think exactly what I said in last weeks blog we were NOT trying to win. But we gambled, didn't catch a top 5 stringer, and still got paid.  Mostly because of one 4-5 lber I was able to catch on a Carolina Rig. So for those of you going to Toledo I will say the 5 pounder last week and our big fish this week both came from 10-15 feet of water, so if I were going to try to catch a big one I would focus on that depth. This week's big fish came on a little known Yamamoto bait called a California Roll in color 301, which I think is one of the best dragging baits on the market. it is a really small profile bait, which seemed to be what we got the most bites on, so I'd stay in that depth range with smaller profile baits. I wouldn't get too hung up on the area of the lake as these two weekends we fished over a 20 mile range, just get in an area you have confidence in, know that the bite is pretty tough, and keep a bait in the water....good luck to all in the  McDonald's and please be careful!