Nico and I fished the ABA season opener at Pedro Saturday. 27 boats. Water 55 degrees and clear like normal. Weather was stormy, we had rain and wind and various combinations of the two.

The lake was down 23 feet since we were there in July. It's a nice lake level for Pedro, lots of stuff to fish. We threw swimbaits all day and zeroed, with two maybe bites and one follower (8lber).

A few years back you could just go to Pedro and fish it and get them good. Now all the obvious stuff has been vaporized, and we need to re-learn the lake at each lake level. Last year Nico learned it when it was real low by practicing a few times and we were able to cash a few checks. This year we didn't practice and the we should have.

The upside of fishing the ABA is that they only take 5 events for your points for the TOC. So it didn't matter if we caught a fish or not yesterday. In the WON Bass we always had to try and catch one small one to make the points. Yesterday we didn't bother.

Fishing was pretty good for the other folks. Very good by the standards of the past few years. Bub and his partner won with 20. 2nd place had an 11lber and 18lbs total. I apologize, I didn't catch the names. I'm sponsoring the big fish trophies this year through the site and it was cool to see it go to a double digit fish.

The most interesting thing I saw at this event was the number of spotted bass weighed in. It sounded like the majority of the bass weighed in were spots. These were chunky 2 to 3lb spots. I had a chance to chat with Randy Pierson a little bit and he said the spots are starting to really take over.

Randy is one of the top sticks on Pedro and he told me he thinks the lake is ruined. A lot of people downplayed the spotted bass when this was discussed 3 or 4 years ago but it sounds like things have tipped and now it's only a matter of time. Sucks. To the fisherman that moved them over to McClure - thanks - you ruined one of the last large lakes in CA that was only largemouth.

In the boat department things went well. We were the only boat in Big Creek at the end of the day and when we came around the corner there were some nice waves piling up in the fetch. 3 and occasionally 4 footers. Not getting thrashed was nice :)