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:)

3 comments:

redkev said...

November 27 early in the morning is going to be the second annual Red Turkey red fish tourney you in?

Nowski said...

I will be out of town :(

DoD Bassman said...

Nowski, great posting and pretty nice blog. I would add Casey Ashley's Fisherman to the playlist.

What I did on John's Lake to win the Classic is what I have been doing for several months now. I was fortunate enough to be some of the last Co-Anglers on the BASS Elite Series. If fished with Dean Rojas last spring on Lake Toho/Kissimmee. He showed me a bait that many people use but I had never seen. It is a Zoom Ultra Vibe Speed Worm. The cut tail on this bait and the Speed Craw are fantastic baits. You get hit on the drop, after it sits on the bottom and especially on the retrieve. I was using Senko's and several other stick baits before and not producing the numbers I now produce. On John's Lake I was fishing a Green Pumpkin Speed Worm in grass and pads. The majority of my bites came from the grass between boat docks. Also I used the same worm on a carolina rig to pull a deep water fish the final day. Finally I used the "Never Give Up" attitude inspired by Mike Iaconelli and caught the winning fish with 3 minutes to spare in a small grass patch 20 yards from the boat ramp.

I look forward to next year with the North Tampa Bass Club. I will am the President and Nowski is our Tournament Director. Should be a great time. Visit our website at www.northtampabassclub.com and join us for our first meeting on Jan 8th 2008 at 7:30 pm at the Beef O'Brady's on Fowler across from USF. Have a great holidays and look forward to fishing with you next year....