I posted this to several of the boards I frequent. I know there are several tournaments coming up on Clear Lake and thought some of you may find this interesting. It is a long story and filled with my many mistakes. Happy reading.



I thought I would write a summary of the Anglers Choice Southern Region Championship held last weekend at Clear Lake from our perspective.
Margaret and I headed up to Clear Lake Tuesday afternoon to compete in the Southern Division Championship. They had the Southern Division championship at Clear Lake to minimize the home field advantage of a local team. What an exciting format and great prize package. First place was TWO 19 ft Basscats with 175 optimax engines, second place was an 18 ft Basscat with a 150. Options were 175.00 and featured a 100 percent payback. Even with all this money on the line, it was the friendliest tournament crowd I have ever been a part of. Everyone genuinely seemed to want everyone to do well and the camaraderie was great. There was even a tournament within the tournament, with all of the regional anglers of the year (7) fishing against each other for a 15,000.00 prize package. Hope I can get angler of the year next year and compete for that prize package. Total payout was well over 100,000.00 and there were only 54 teams competing for the prizes. Wow what odds.... on to the fishing.

Wednesday prefish was a day that sometimes happens to all of us. Second stop of the day, my favorite castaway cranking rod and reel combo takes a swim in deep water, never to be seen again. Third stop of the day, I break the tip of a V rod pulling it out of the locker. It was a cold breezy day and we spent some time running around to get the feel of the lake. Since we only have 2 days to prefish (due to work and real life) we are trying to eliminate areas on day 1 and find something to pattern. We hit Rodman slough on the north end for a few hours with nothing to show. Cranking a rocky shorline past the Narrows was not productive today. Everyone we talked to had a slower day and a bite I had expected to be on was missing completely. We had no topwater fish at all. We also caught very few fish on blades or cranks. I did find one possible pattern as I had a bit of a frog bite going over the thick mats late in the day. As we pulled out after a long day of fishing, some locals talked to us and told us of their good day using jigs under docks. (Cooch had also mentioned to me in his e-mail response that jigs were a favored technique for this time of the year on this pond) I talked it over with the wife and we decided to check out that pattern for our last prefish day.

Thursday prefish was a different day with light winds and delightful weather with a bright sun shining over us. No broken rods, so the day was automatically better than the day before. We spent the day checking into different areas and still trying to find something that would give us better fish. We were catching allot of fish, but could not find the bigger bites. We checked the canals off Rattlesnake arm and found muddy water and no fish. We decided to go back to the South arm and check out the dock pattern. As I was running through the Rattlesnake arm, a little voice in my head wondered..I wonder how Rattlesnake Island and the docks in this arm are doing for fish. Due to the short prefish day (off the water at 3:00) I did not stop to check. In hindsight, this was a mistake. Back in the south arm, we determined that there was a good quantity of fish holding under docks. The east side seemed to have a bit better fish. Jigs and worms were productive and we caught 20 keeper-sized fish as we burned through docks trying to establish a pattern for what they were holding on. Shade was obvious. The fish seemed to be stacked better under docks with 12 or more feet of water near the end. This placed the weed line outer edge (8 ft deep in most parts) under the dock and shade. This seemed important but I didn't make the correct connections until hindsight kicked in on the drive home on Saturday night. We headed off to the sign-up and dinner. Great meeting, decent dinner and new hats later, Margaret and I headed to our cottage (shared with some fellow fisherman from our Inland Empire region) to prep our rods and try to keep the nerves in check.

Fishing day 1. Boat number 40 we watch everyone ahead of us pull out as their number is called. They get to 39 and over the loudspeaker we hear, "Margaret, go catch a big fish and show him how it is done". This personal greeting really made my wife's day. As a couple, we have several advantages and disadvantages while fishing. We are both relatively inexperienced, especially in the California fishing scene, so we are still desperately trying to learn. On the plus side, I get a kiss from my partner every time we catch a fish.
We start on a series of docks that were similar to what we found the first day. My goal for today is 15 lds and hope for a kicker. Margaret seems to be motivated by Marks loudspeaker greeting and puts the first 4 fish in the boat on a dropshotted brown and chartreuse worm. I am throwing a brown jig with a hula grub trailer (cinnamon and blue fleck or brown and purple) We work a few docks and have our limit by 8:30. The problem is the same as we had before, no size as we are at around 9 lds for our five fish. We pull into a shallow cove where we had caught a 4 (our best fish in prefish) with high hopes but don't improve our weight. We are catching fish regularly so we jeep working the docks and tules, waiting for the bigger fish to move up into the shade. There is a light scattered cloud covering and it may have affected the big girls because we never cull up more than a few ounces at a time. Fishing Socal and being new to the game, we are happy to be catching 20 fish a day. This may have led us to be locked into the pattern. I was afraid to leave fish to find fish. I knew I was fishing a big fish bait and tried to stay patient while I waited for the right bite. Back to the scales, we weigh 10.21 and are in the middle of the pack. Dock talks speaks of several big fish caught on cranks and rattletraps. (DOH.... guess I eliminated that pattern too quick) Back to the cottage to regroup and plan a strategy for tomorrow.

Fishing day 2
We know we need a big bag to make a run at getting a boat. We decide to crank at a drop off first thing in the morning. We run up to the edge and find dead shad scattered around our break that goes from 8 ft to 12 ft. Scattered rocks on the upper level give us hope as we begin to crank. DD14's and 22 are my weapon in citrus shad and white while I have Margaret throw a Rapala DT 16 in chartreuse firetiger. At 9:00 we take stock of our plan. We have 3 small fish in the boat. There is a bit less cloud cover than the day before so we decide to give the docks another shot. (I think this is called getting locked into a losing pattern) We quickly finish out our limit with more small fish using jigs and rattletraps. A local fishing off of his dock mentions that there is a weed line further out that holds fish. Desperate, we troll off to the deeper edge and quickly catch a fish that culls out one of our dinks. We continue to work the outer edge but don't pick up any more help. Sliding back into a deepwater dock, I toss the jig next to a piling in deep shade and feel a tap. I set the hook, Margaret grabs the net and we have our best fish of the tournament at close to 4 lds. All right, this is more like it. We continue to work the docks for a bit but don't improve any. We run back down the lake to check the ledge again with crankbaits. Nothing. We still have 1 very small fish that we want to get rid of BAD. We run back to a dock and Margaret says we need a fish. We have 30 minutes of fishing time left. A boat prefishing for the BASS tournament is working our way towards us. As we exchange greetings, I toss the jig into a shady spot and felt the tap. I quickly set the hook and we have our dink culled out. Our fish are still small and we are not going to win anything but I feel like we do not have to be embarrassed by our weight. Major victory for us. Margaret hates being last or blanking. I hope to learn enough as we keep fishing together to avoid her feeling that way. She was a trooper for all four days. Anyone that can put up with me for 4 days on a boat deserves a medal.

We finish up in 34th place. Not great but not bad. We learned allot about the lake in only 4 days and I think we learned allot about fishing in general. The winners mentioned a deeper cranking pattern that we tried. There were also several people who caught nice fish by running DD-22's in shallow water off of the tules. I completely missed finding the reaction bite, maybe because we get so locked into worming in SoCal. The tournament was a blast and had the best payout of prizes I can ever remember. Most of the SoCal regions are new and just starting up. If you’re interested in a circuit with an awesome payback at the end of the year...take a look at Angler's Choice. (Just not the Inland Empire region..after all I want Angler of the year there and don't have the experience yet to beat most of you head to head.. :-> ) The complete results can be found on the Anglers Choice website.



http://anglerschoice.com/southwest_regional_final_story_1.html