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Let me start by saying I still cringe everytime I think about this past Saturday.  I had absolutely no intention whatsoever of fishing Champs on Travis, but once again drinking too much beer Friday evening led to a very bad decision.

It's probably not a good sign when you wake up in the morning and think to yourself, "Wow, I really can't believe we're fishing today"; followed immediately by "We really need to cut a check and break even for this stupid decision".  Still, we handed over our $350 like it was Monopoly money and drew boat 99.  Tom and I headed south and started the day throwing spinner baits and squarebilled cranks around rocky points, but with the slack water and lack of wind we quickly abandoned that 10 minutes later and headed for deeper water.

The first fish came 20 minutes into the day on a TX rigged Trophy Hunter RattleSnake; it was caught in 20' of water and weighed a little over 3 pounds.  We fished the area for the next hour without another bite.  Made a move to some boat slips and caught our second 14.5" keeper from under a shallow walkway on the the RattleSnake, we also caught another dink in the area.  Moved to a ledge and threw football jigs, Senkos and deep cranks for the next hour or so without another bite; then around 11:00 we put two solid keepers in the boat almost back to back on a shakyhead Trophy Hunter Baby RattleSnake.  Ended up catching one more 14.25" keeper on the shakyhead Baby Snake before noon.  The fish was caught in 30' and it started to bleed after we fizzed it; we made the decision to let it go hoping to catch another solid keeper instead of taking a chance of the fish dying in our possession.  Unfortunately that was the last bite we had the rest of the day.  We fished as far south as Hatters and all the way back up to Briar Cliff and saw water temps to nearly 58 degrees.  I still can't believe we didn't catch a single fish from noon till 3:00.   

Weighed in four fish for 9.15 pounds and ended up in 50th place.  I'm still kicking myself in the nuts for making the decision to fish and talking my partner into it.  Every rational bone in my body told me not to do it – but tournament fishing is a sick addiction and once again I'm going to spend another hour of therapy trying to figure out why I love to punish myself over and over again.  My therapist has pretty much told me I'm retarded, my family does the same.  After this weekend I'm really starting to believe them.

Congrats to everyone that cut a check on a very tough day on Travis.