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Date:8/25/2008

I fished the Central Pro-Am event at Stockton Lake on August 23rd & 24th and had a good finish at 4^th place, just 0.75 lbs from the top. I’ll break down my practice and competition days into two journals.

Practice Day 1

My first day of practice was pretty short, I snatched up the kids after work and fished for about 3 hours on a Tuesday evening until dark. We fished the Little Sac arm since it was the closest to home. The last two summers I’ve been able to catch some fish in that arm but the water level had been significantly lower. We’ve had so much rain this year that the lake was still about 4 feet over pool but dropping each day.

I thought maybe there would still be some fish in the bushes and knew of several willow trees on gravel flats that have been productive in the past. I flipped the bushes with a worm and a tube but did not see any shad on the flat at all. Of course, no shad means no fish. I didn’t waste much time on that but it was worth a try. Off to some points.

The water was still a little too high for the fish to really get grouped up on the drops but with the tournament being nearly two weeks away, I was fishing for what I hoped would be the future conditions. I found fish but they weren’t where I wanted them to be. Nor was the size right. With a limited amount of time to fish, I was only able to fish a handful of locations and the kids wanted to swim a little also. So as they swam off the one side of the boat, I fished hoping the fish didn’t really care about the splashing. I fished a worm to start but just didn’t get the number of bites I thought I should have been getting. I moved to a couple of key points and didn’t let the kids swim. Emily grabbed a rod and decided to get in the action. 

I switched to a baby brush hog and that was the ticket. Just about every cast we had a fish on but they were 14 inches and smaller. We caught about 30 fish without a 15 inch keeper. The fish were between the drop and the bank cruising in about 5 feet of water eating shad. The water was just too high to concentrate the fish and who knows where the bigger fish were. Catching fish was fun but those weren’t going to help me out during a tournament. 

With just a little time left before dark, I switched to a football jig and the average size increased. Not that I hooked any keepers but it was food for thought. I usually have better success with plastics in the summer but the recent cool week had dropped the water temperature to 79-80 degrees and the fish reacted well to the jig. 

My tournament partner Ben Henderson went up there the next day and his success was about the same, lots of shorts but he did have a few keepers. He fished another section of the lake and found one bank on the lower lake that had potential to help me out.  Ben and I always put our heads together when it comes to tournaments, no matter if we fish together or not.  I can think of many times when our collective work has paid off and Ben always gets a share of the credit.

Practice Day 2

The Sunday prior to the tournament would be my only full day of practice. The lake had dropped at least a foot, maybe more since I was last there. I was sticking to my game plan, ignoring the flooded bushes and concentrating on deeper structure. The last row of bushes was still in the water and fishable but I was banking on the water continuing to drop out right up to the tournament and pulling the fish out to the drops. Stockton is notorious for fish being shallow if the cover is still wet, no matter what the water temperature is. With a limited practice, I had to take a chance and hope the plan come together. Without a big rain, the water level could be low in the bushes by tournament time and the fish would hopefully vacate to deeper water.

Ben and I had both fished the Little Sac arm so I figured I’d better put in on the Big Sac arm and check some locations over there. Maybe we were just around small fish and a change of location might change my luck.

I was on the water by day-break and went out on the main lake to work drop-offs near big flats. I decided to start with a 3/16 oz Eiron Breaker finesse head for some reason, likely just to catch some feisty smallmouth and had fun for a little bit before the sun got up. The first fish I had was a keeper largemouth and then I had several smallies tear into me. I did this for 45 minutes and got it out of my system. I was having fun catching fish but the size wasn’t there. Time to upgrade and see if my football jig was going to give me a better size.

I switched to a brown purple flash 5/8 oz Eiron Breaker football jig with a Zoom speed craw trailer and immediately started catching fish. And they were still small. Ok, now what? Just keep fishing and maybe the better fish will show up. I had two areas fairly close together and I fished one to get a feel for it again. Then I idled over it to see where the fish were and exactly how the drop laid in relation to visible clues on the bank. I don’t have a massive GPS/LCR in the boat and rely on a hand-held GPS if needed but mostly I’m a bank beater. The structure I fish I can line things up pretty good so I’m comfortable with it. I did find a brush pile on the drop that someone placed so that was good. 

I moved over to the other drop and started to feel my way around it. There was an older gentleman trolling back and forth on the flat for walleyes but we weren’t getting in each other’s water. I started out real deep and was working my way in. Then a boat came running up and shut down between us. The guys stood up, dropped the trolling motor and began to troll next to me, between me and the other guy. They were half a cast away from me and just didn’t seem to mind at all. I kept casting my jig but wasn’t moving very quickly up the drop. They trolled right in front of my boat and I could have cast into theirs if I wanted to. I think they were trolling for white bass or whatever they could catch and didn’t seem to mind how close they got to me. I didn’t say anything but I wasn’t going to leave just because they wanted to push their way onto the spot. I’ve had this happen at other lakes but never at Stockton. For the most part, everyone gets along and is courteous with people who are there first.

I held my ground and as I came to 12-16 feet of water, I started to connect with the fish. I caught more than my fair share from that spot and mostly because I wasn’t happy about how they were fishing over me. I just sat there and wouldn’t move off it. I caught a bunch of shorts and had a few nice keepers.

Should I have worked the area over so hard because they ticked me off? No, but it did tell me something and the spot had a whole week to rest before the tournament. The better fish were relating to a small portion of the drop and you had to cast just right to get the right presentation. Also, the schools of fish may be larger than I thought and the size structure might be all mixed together. Maybe as the water drops off the flats, all of the fish pull out together and are in big schools. Throughout the day, not all drops had fish but the ones on the main lake holding fish had a wide variety of fish sizes on them. I might just have to weed through a bunch of fish to get to the better ones.

The rest of the day went pretty good. I worked my way up the Big Sac arm and marked off locations not holding fish and some that were. I caught a 5 lb and 3 lb largemouth and three more keeper smallmouths on the jig. At 1 pm, I loaded on the trailer and went to the Little Sac arm to revisit the school of small fish I caught on Tuesday. I needed to know if the better fish would react to a jig and if they were moving off the flat to the drop-off. Yep on both accounts. I hooked a couple of shorts and just as I got to the tip of one point, another largemouth sucked in my jig that was pushing 3 lbs. Enough for the day and I had a plan put together.

A nice 5.27 lb Stockton largemouth.

Ok, they seemed to be moving out to the drops with the falling water level and the sizes are all mixed up across the lake. I hoped that they would still want the football jig come tournament time.  I believe that just because there are a bunch of short fish on a location, if it was the right structure I could get the better fish to bite after weeding through the smaller fish. I had 8 to 10 locations to fish so that should be enough to last over two days. I caught about 15 lbs with the best 5 and I’d thought 26-28 lbs would be enough to win a two day event. Maybe I’d be completely wrong and someone will bust 20 lbs one day but who knows. That why tournament fishing is so addictive, am I on enough to win it and can I make the right adjustments to make them bite? Two days of fishing would answer those questions.