Toyota Texas Bass Classic – Carrot Stix PAA Series Championship

One of my goals for the 2009 Tournament season was to qualify for the Toyota Texas Bass Classic, which for two years prior was a four-man, team concept, which changed in 2009 to our Carrot Stix PAA Tour Series Championship. 

Golf States Toyota hosts an awesome tournament, and with two Top- 5 finishes under my belt I really did not want to miss an opportunity to compete on Conroe.  I fished pretty clean all season, and had a Top-10 finish at Toho placing 12^th in the PAA overall points standing well within the championship cut.    

Immediately following the PAA’s final event on Toledo Bend we loaded up and headed a few hours south from Hemphill to Conroe Texas..  Monday morning I finally got my first look at Conroe during the three days of official practice. 

I knew that the lake was full of giant Florida Strain bass and according to the chatter was full of brush piles.  What everyone failed to mention was the number of docks on the lake.  Feeling the pressure to locate deep fish I found some beautiful brush piles using my Humminbird Side Imaging electronics.  The only problem was that I couldn’t get a bite on it. I fished a jig, big worms and a crankbait, but it wasn’t just slow, it was non-existent.

Practice was half over when I decided to change up and concentrated on the docks.  I broke out my Lunker Lure finesse jig, and went to work.  It was cloudy and windy, which may be what prevented the deep fish from biting, but it also had an effect on those shallow fish, too. Under those conditions they get loose and run the seawalls. I used a Zara Spook and a Pop-R to find them, realizing all along that when the weather cleared off they’d get sucked back into the docks.

I was totally at ease with the techniques involved, but didn’t feel like I had a great area to start on. The first day it definitely didn’t work right out of the gate. It was still cloudy and it started slowly, but eventually I started catching a few fish on the outside dock posts. I ended up with about 9 or 10 keepers and a decent sack of over 13 pounds.

It was really cold on the second day and the water temperature had dropped 8 degrees. I started in a completely different area and by nine o’clock I had two bites that really keyed me in to what the fish were doing. They had moved, not far, not even off the docks, but they’d repositioned on those docks to the shallowest places they could get. Typically that meant under the walkways. I could make two casts to each dock, one to each side of the shallowest part of the walkway, and that was it. I’d move on. That allowed me to cover a lot of water, which was critical. The other key element was timing. I hit a good stretch during a one and a half hour period when they were really snapping and because I was so dialed in I was able to make the most of it.

Heading into the final day of the tournament, I was in 4^th place, within reach of leader (and eventual winner) Dave Lefebre and I stayed dialed in. In fact, I caught fish until I was sick of catching them. I just never got a big bite. That day, timing may have been my downfall. I was sharing water with some other anglers in the top ten, including Aaron Martens, and I was always worried about whether I was following him or whether he was behind me. As it turned out, I caught three limits of fish, but Aaron got the good bites. It just wasn’t meant to be.

With the bite getting tougher for most of us who remained, I knew I just needed one big bite or a couple of decent bites, but it didn’t happen and I was disappointed. Still, I ended the year on a good note, both in terms of the points race and the championship.   This always provides good momentum heading into the next season.