John and I fished the WON Bass Tri-States North Team Championship at Clear this weekend. We drove around the lake Thursday to check things out since neither of us had been on the water since our last tourney there 4 months ago. The Lakeport side looked like a lot of the weeds had been sprayed. Nice and Lucerne side had more weeds and looked decent but the water is really low. It turned out we never fished North but that's some info for what it's worth.

Friday morning came and there we were the 103rd boat out of 106. I have that kind of luck when it comes to the draw :-) Around the time they were calling out boat 90 we decided to hit some water in rattlesnake that we had caught some fish on last year. We pull up and as John is tossing the trolling motor in, I'm about 5 cranks into my first cast of the day and get whacked by a 3lber. Whoa. Maybe 3 or 4 minutes later I get another one, same size. Nice way to break in my new rainshadow that Brian made for me. I was throwing a 5" big hammer swimbait and John says give me one of those! I barely turn around he gets a 3lber, and then follows it up with a fat 6.59lber about 10 minutes later. Major whoa! It was funny because I didn't see him put that swimbait on, so after he caught the 6 I mentioned that I had thrown it up on the front deck. He goes, yeah I put it on right before I caught that 3! We hit the swimbait bank once more for nothing and then moved on. At 8:45 John is throwing the 9" MS Slammer and sticks a 5 and a half to finish our limit out. We were pumped to say the least. Not wanting to beat up the area we started running all over the south end hoping to maybe pick up another big fish or find fish for the next day. I got one fish to cull, a 3-10 on the 7" Slammer around 10am but after that it was pretty darn tough despite covering a ton of water. I managed one 2 and a half that didn't cull on the big hammer swimbait and one about 13" fish on a 9" Slammer ( agressive little guy ) John had a nice follower on the Slammer that didn't bite and right before weigh in I had one grab the tail of my 7" plug and then hit it again, right at the boat. I barn dogged it and pulled it away too quick. That fish was maybe 4lbs or so. In any case we weighed a good bag of 22.4lbs and were in 6th place after day 1.

Saturday we were 3rd boat out and the weather was looking similar to the day before so we had hopes that we could make the swimbait bite work again. A couple passes on our good water for nothing was a little baffling especially since we left it alone after getting 5 fish off it the day before. We started running around again like the day before and hitting areas where we had seen followers or caught fish. It was really as if someone had flipped a switch. John had a 3lber follow his Slammer around 10am but other than that it was dead as dead could be. Hell even the birds were all asleep up on docks and in the shade. It was really weird. We had confidence in the swimbaits though and never put them down until around 1:30 when we just couldn't take it any more. We parked ourselves on Shag rock since there was no one there and decided to fish out the day there. I broke out the trout gear ( no not the gear for throwing trout lures, the gear for catching trout ) and drop shotted a 3" worm on 6lb line. Sure enough about 20 minutes after we got there I got a nice mush bite that wound up being a 4 and a half pounder. We kept after that until the end but only caught minnows.

So it was sure an interesting weekend and we had a great time on Friday no question. Of course we were disappointed not to have a good bag on Saturday, but considering the way our year has been and how many good days we have had by just going out and winging it, we couldn't be too bummed that we didn't get a bag over 21lbs for our 5th consecutive tournament day this year on clear lake :-) Even with a tough day 2 we wound up in 21st place with 26.94lbs for 6 fish. Clear lake certainly didn't give up her fish easily this weekend for anybody.

I also wanted to mention my sponsors because I feel so lucky to be sponsored by two companies whose baits we used this weekend and so many times to catch good fish. My sponsors are MS Slammer and Fishco Manufacturing, makers of Big Hammer swimbaits and Assalt soft plastics. Thanks Mike and Butch!

John and I are looking forward to another great season fishing in the WONdering region. We kick it off in January at Nacimiento. I'm looking forward to it already.

-Rob