Bass N Fly 09

Bass N Fly 09

Swamp Crawler, Bass Worm and Rainbow fry I tied up just for the event.  

Swamp Crawler takes a nice one. 

Running in the bass boat.  

Robert with the first fish of the morning on top water.  

Our two best fish of the Comp day.  

Good enough for 3ed place!!  

To much of California, Spring time means Bass fishing!!  That's right folks, it's time for the 2ed annual Bass N Fly Challenge down in the Delta.  This years event was another great success. There were over 30 teams competing and the Team Bass N Fly Team did a great job of organizing and running the event.  The fishing was tough this year though.  Not as many fish were caught as last  year.  The wind was blowing and the fish were slow on the bite.  I fished this year once again with Robert Johnson from the Save Delta Fish.com.  Last year we had gotten 4th, so this year we were out to beat that.  We had a wild ride to say the least.   Robert had been putting in several days pre fishing and really knows the Delta fishing well.  I was relying on him to know the spots.  I tied up some flies and knew i could make the shots if Robert put us on some fish.  I showed up the day before the event to pre fish.  We went all over the place looking at some favorite spots and exploring new water.  It was a decent day, but only yielded a couple fish.  At the end of the day on our run home, Robert's compressor on his motor blew and we had to limp as far as we could with the electric motor before Rick and Charlie Bisharat came out to get us and tow us to John Sherman's place in Diso Bay.  After a long night of shuttling cars we were able to get his boat out of the water and Robert was able to talk his good friend Pat into loaning us his boat for the tournament.  So after a few hours of sleep, we were back on the water in time for the event.  

The highlight of our day was watching some Black Bass feeding on bait fish in some heavy weeds.  They were going crazy on these fish.  Tails splashing out out of the water, bellies rolling, flopping on top of the weeds.  It was really cool to watch.  We heard them feeding and headed over there for a few cast.  We ended up spending the next 3.5 hours fishing to those fish. Never got the big ones we saw, but ended up pulling a few fish in the 3-3.5 lb. range.  Got a couple smaller ones too and that was our 5 fish for the day.   We tried another spot for the next couple hours but with no more fish to the boat.  After some trouble with the motor, we didn't think we were going to make it back to the dock, but somehow we got it going and made weigh in just in time.  Turned out the fishing was slow for everyone.  Our five fish were good enough for 3rd place.  

Big thanks to Robert Johnson, John Sherman, Charlie Bisharat, Rick, Keith, K.D., Ken Hanley, Steve Potter, Brent Dawson, J.R., Toby, Jeff Currier and everyone else who showed up and and helped make this event a great success.