Wednesday, November 19, 2008

North Tampa Bass Classic-John's Lake Results

We finished up 2008 with our 2-day Classic tournament on John's Lake this weekend for North Tampa Bass Club and the bite was not what we usually expect from John's Lake. Saturday started off slow for my co-angler and I as we started in the cut entering Clear Lake. There was absolutely no surface activity most of the day and bites would turn on and then off just as quick! My co-angler John McCallister got his limit of 5 fish for the day with 5.12lbs I believe and I managed 3 fish for 3.12lbs all in Clear Lake. We got most of the keepers on the dock line on the south side of Clear Lake with a bunch of small ones mixed in. I was using my Bitters sling baits in black and John was using black with blue flake (yamamoto I believe). We got a few keepers on a hydrilla line we found on the other side of Clear lake as well using 7.5 inch Culprits in Junebug. The wind was kicking pretty good most of the day making it a little difficult as my trolling motor is on it's last leg and has very little power! The water temp was between 68 and 72 the whole day and the cloud cover lingered for most of the day. Not bad conditions especially for what the forcast was for Sunday!
Sunday morning started off with the air-temp around 40 and the water temp around 68 but the wind seemed to hold off for the first hour giving us a chance to maybe pick a few off before that wind starts howling. We started on our hydrilla line and I managed to get two hits in the first half hour or so but missed both. I knew that would be huge as it was going to be the kind of day were five bites might be all I see! We wound up getting nothing at that spot so we moved to docks were we started getting some hits. By this time it was about 10:00am and with a noon weigh-in we needed keepers bad! I managed one quickly but that would be my only keeper for the rest of the day. John managed to pull 3 off the docks to finish the weekend in 3rd place. Nice tourny John! Steve Jarret won the tournament with 11+ lbs and will maybe leave a comment on where he was fishing:)

Sunday, November 16, 2008

John's Lake Report -Prefish 11/13

Got out on John's Lake for about 5 hours on Thursday to pre-fish for our 2-day Classic for North Tampa Bass Club to be held on Sat/Sun 15th-16th. I started out at 7:30am at the cut between the two main bodies of water with no bites and no surface action what so ever. This would be a recurring theme for most of the afternoon as I hit every corner of the lake including Black Lake, The Horse Shoe, Southwest corner, the cut leading to Clear Lake, and finally Clear Lake at about noon. In Clear Lake, I immediately got a small one on a rapala shad rap of a boat launch right at noon. Followed that 15 minutes later with another small one under a dock and then nailed a strange looking 4.8 pounder under a dock 5 minutes after that. I decided I found my starting point for the weekend and packed it in for the day. The 4.8 pounder was actually 23 inches long which would usually put it at about 6-7 pounds easy! Very skinny as you can see from the pic!


I will give Classic results tomorrow....