Tournament bass fishing has been a huge part of my life since the early 1990s and occasionally, the sport reminds you that you’re not as good as you think you are. Tournament bass fishing has a way of checking your ego and bringing an angler back down to earth. This happened to me just recently at an event on Lake of the Pines located in the heart of East Texas.
As I arrived for practice on Tuesday for the ABA Solo 150 Tour event No. 1, I carried high expectations for several reasons. I had fished well there in the past and a warming trend was taking place for the entire week, which should have meant the bass would be pulling up into the shallows.
Next, based on the results of tournaments staged over the weeks prior to our event, it appeared the bass were biting. And the fact that spring was looking to make an early arrival had me beaming with excitement.
Nothing gets an angler’s blood flowing more than the thought of bass getting ready to spawn. This is when the big female bass (known as big girls; sorry ladies) come in looking for a place to lay their eggs. It’s a time when they are most vulnerable to being caught, so it just might be my favorite time of year to bass fish.
While 90 percent of all tournament anglers don’t keep bass to eat, they still enjoy the challenge of catching bass off their beds. Female bass (big girls) can be tough to catch this time of year when it comes to biting an artificial lure during the spawn. They just don’t bite the same when they are on the bed (nest) laying their eggs.
For this event, however, it was all about location, location, location! Never in my 30-plus years of tournament bass fishing have I seen the number of five fish bags being weighed over 30 pounds each. Based off simple math (which I can do), some of these anglers were weighing in a 6-pound average for every bass in their bag.
It would not shock many anglers for someone to do this during any springtime event, but in this tournament, five anglers did it on the final day with one angler (the winner) bringing in a little over 39 pounds with a five bass limit!
That’s just shy of an 8-pound average, which is unheard of. By the way, the same angler that weighed 39 pounds on the final day of our event, followed that up with another huge bag over 30 pounds the next weekend in another event.
Here’s how the weigh-in went for me: I had a little over 13 pounds on Day 1 and 14 plus on Day 2 for a total of 27.85 pounds, landing me in the middle of the pack at 21st place. Basically, I was 34 pounds behind the leader, which is the largest margin I’ve ever lost by in a tournament. It was as if I was fishing on a completely different lake than the top 10 anglers!
I would like to point out that there were a few guys complaining about ONLY catching 23-24 pounds at the weigh-in. Hey guys, here’s some free advice from someone who has been doing this for over 30 years. When you complain about having over 20 pounds at a weigh-in, it makes you look arrogant and dumb — SO DON’T DO THAT!!!
Now that I have that off my chest, there’s one thing I do know about bass fishing. You never stop learning, and you never quit trying. You just lick your wounds and move on to the next tournament. I do recognize that this event was the exception to the rule when it comes to 30-pound bags being weighed-in. But this one event truly humbled me as an angler.
While these kinds of weights coming to the scales is not the norm for most area lakes, Lake of the Pines is fishing exceptionally well at this time when compared to other lakes in our region. This is a testament to the outstanding job Texas Parks and Wildlife is doing with managing all our Texas lakes.
‘Til next time, keep your hooks wet and your live wells full and make sure you take the time to take a kid fishing!
Contact Steve at sgraf26@yahoo.com