TCBC Lake Fork Tournament
Just got home from the Tarrant Christian Bass Club tournament on Lake Fork. It was a beautiful day, and the fishing and fellowship was outstanding. The catching could have been better, but there are more important things. I had originally intended to drive down Friday night and stay at the Lake Fork Marina with some of the other guys, but work kept me late all week and I didn’t have time to get my gear ready. So, at 10pm on Friday night I was still out prepping rods, retying line, checking over the boat, charging the batteries, and cleaning out the truck. My alarm was set to go off at 3am!
I hadn’t drawn a co-angler for the tournament, so I invited a good friend that I grew up with, Jamie Reid, owner of Giga Fix It Computer Service, to come along and fish with me. He and his young family had moved back to Texas, and he now lives only an hour or so away. They were driving to Longview on Friday night to visit his folks for the weekend, and Lake Fork is a fairly short drive from there. Obviously, I had not had a chance to pre-fish for the tournament, and he suggested calling another old friend to get a fishing report. We don’t have an off limits period in our tournaments where you aren’t allowed to get information on the tournament lake, so Friday night I found myself on a conference call with my buddy and another old friend that I haven’t seen in 25 years!
Another boater’s co-angler called and needed a ride to the lake, so at 4am he arrives at my house in Arlington and we hit the road. We stopped in Canton for gas and breakfast and ran into another club member at the Whataburger. He was fishing with his girlfriend, and I showed him no mercy by calling her the wrong name but stopped short of telling her that she was a lot prettier than the girl he brought along the last tournament. If you can’t bust your buddy’s chops at 5:30 in the morning, you’re probably a better friend than I am.
The air temp out there dropped to 24 degrees. We arrived at the marina, unloaded his gear into his boater’s rig, and I made the rounds of good mornings and helped our club president take the ice covered cover off of his boat. Jamie called, and he and his Dad were just finishing up breakfast at the Whataburger in Longview (I’m thinking Whataburger should consider becoming a sponsor, right? Haha!). He arrived at a public ramp not far away from the marina, and we decided that we would trailer the boat to the east fork of the lake and launch from there.
The water temp was 38 degrees when we launched. We gave the motor a good amount of time to warm up, and even then we idled back north under the bridge to the Glade Creek area of the lake looking for deep water grass. The icy cold weather we have had leading up to the tournament, and the high barometric pressure we were in did not bode well for the prospects of catching fish. We knew it would be a tough bite, but our hope was that as the day warmed up the fish might turn on just long enough to get on the board.
We fished the sun bathed banks first, found a smattering of aquatic grass in various depths and fished jigs, crank baits, rattle traps, creature baits, wacky worms, and then we moved to the north bank lee shores finding water only one degree warmer. We flipped timber, we Carolina rigged main lake points, and our efforts only produced one 17 inch bass for Jamie that came on a white jig in about 4 ft of water near the fattest submerged stump in the field.
Weigh in demonstrated that most of the other 20 or so anglers shared similar experiences, but the sunshine, that had been so elusive the last couple of weeks, was plentiful, the conversation meaningful, and the next time I am faced with similar circumstances I will approach it better than I did this trip. Lake Fork kicked my tail, but I would sure do it again. Fishing and visiting with old and new friends is hard to beat.
Be safe, be Naturally Fun, and I’ll see you on the water!
I hadn’t drawn a co-angler for the tournament, so I invited a good friend that I grew up with, Jamie Reid, owner of Giga Fix It Computer Service, to come along and fish with me. He and his young family had moved back to Texas, and he now lives only an hour or so away. They were driving to Longview on Friday night to visit his folks for the weekend, and Lake Fork is a fairly short drive from there. Obviously, I had not had a chance to pre-fish for the tournament, and he suggested calling another old friend to get a fishing report. We don’t have an off limits period in our tournaments where you aren’t allowed to get information on the tournament lake, so Friday night I found myself on a conference call with my buddy and another old friend that I haven’t seen in 25 years!
Another boater’s co-angler called and needed a ride to the lake, so at 4am he arrives at my house in Arlington and we hit the road. We stopped in Canton for gas and breakfast and ran into another club member at the Whataburger. He was fishing with his girlfriend, and I showed him no mercy by calling her the wrong name but stopped short of telling her that she was a lot prettier than the girl he brought along the last tournament. If you can’t bust your buddy’s chops at 5:30 in the morning, you’re probably a better friend than I am.
The air temp out there dropped to 24 degrees. We arrived at the marina, unloaded his gear into his boater’s rig, and I made the rounds of good mornings and helped our club president take the ice covered cover off of his boat. Jamie called, and he and his Dad were just finishing up breakfast at the Whataburger in Longview (I’m thinking Whataburger should consider becoming a sponsor, right? Haha!). He arrived at a public ramp not far away from the marina, and we decided that we would trailer the boat to the east fork of the lake and launch from there.
The water temp was 38 degrees when we launched. We gave the motor a good amount of time to warm up, and even then we idled back north under the bridge to the Glade Creek area of the lake looking for deep water grass. The icy cold weather we have had leading up to the tournament, and the high barometric pressure we were in did not bode well for the prospects of catching fish. We knew it would be a tough bite, but our hope was that as the day warmed up the fish might turn on just long enough to get on the board.
We fished the sun bathed banks first, found a smattering of aquatic grass in various depths and fished jigs, crank baits, rattle traps, creature baits, wacky worms, and then we moved to the north bank lee shores finding water only one degree warmer. We flipped timber, we Carolina rigged main lake points, and our efforts only produced one 17 inch bass for Jamie that came on a white jig in about 4 ft of water near the fattest submerged stump in the field.
Weigh in demonstrated that most of the other 20 or so anglers shared similar experiences, but the sunshine, that had been so elusive the last couple of weeks, was plentiful, the conversation meaningful, and the next time I am faced with similar circumstances I will approach it better than I did this trip. Lake Fork kicked my tail, but I would sure do it again. Fishing and visiting with old and new friends is hard to beat.
Be safe, be Naturally Fun, and I’ll see you on the water!
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