13 teams fished, 7 teams weighed in and 2 places were paid.
13 teams fished the Lake Travis Tuesday night tournament this week and were greeted by heat, a little cloud cover and some pretty high winds. After last week’s rough weigh-in, where it took just over six pounds to win, there were some old faces out to get revenge on these finicky Travis bass.
Even though the fishing was still relatively slow, the weights did improve. With the top three teams all at over eight pounds with three fish bags each, it was a tight horse race and some really nice fish were brought to the scales.
Winning back-to-back tournaments, by a nose, was the team of Brian Booker and Grant Schnabel. With three bass at 8.78 pounds, they squeaked out a win with just ounces to spare over the next two teams. Grant told us about their interesting win, good for a cool $235.
“We started out on the cables like last week. Other than the one small bass I caught there, we got nothing else to bite. So we headed on the second stop of our milk run over to the ledge end we’ve been fishing later in the day. We were still fishing 10 inch worms and Senkos, but things were much slower for us this week. Brian had caught a chunky 15 incher, and I had an even chunkier barely keeper with NO time left.”
This is where it gets good.
“Brian just said he figured we better start heading back and was leaning down to secure his rods. On literally my last cast I decided to throw a bigger football head jig, and go for broke. As I was bouncing it pretty aggressively off the rocks, it just loaded up. I told Brian I had a fish, and he looked up at my rod doubled and thought I was hung up in the rocks and just screwing with him. Then she came up and we both freaked out! She made a couple runs under the boat before we got her in the net. Little did we know at the time what that fish would do for us.”
Can you say never give up? Nice job guys on another Travis win!
Taking advantage of his free tourney entry won in our monthly TTZ raffle was Landon Glass, who fished with partner Brian Hughes. Their healthy three fish bag of 8.63 pounds was good for $155 and second place. We talked to Landon about their day.
“We caught our fish suspended under docks over some real deep water on blades. Caught ‘em real early on. Thought we were gonna get in ‘em pretty good, but the bite slowed down for us. Good to get a check on a free entry though, that TTZ raffle paid off pretty well for us!”
Landon also told us he had two more fish in the four pound class follow and nose his bait before spooking off, but unfortunately the boat was not in a position to make a follow up cast. Congrats guys on the finish – broken hand and all!
Third place and the Fish Finders tackle pack went to Mike James and Andy Nuyen; they also had a three fish bag that topped out at a little over eight pounds.
“Like most of the teams we are focusing on deeper water; the boat is sitting in 40 feet and we’re dragging football jigs in 20-25 feet most of the time. We’ve managed to bring in a four pound fish or better at nearly every Tues Nighter we’ve fished this year…just can’t seem to find them grouped up just yet,” said Andy.
Well guys, the Tuesday Night Tournament is winding down, and you only have six more opportunities to bring in that 8 pounder! But, if the pot isn’t won by August 24th, we will host a full day tournament on August 28th on Travis. To be eligible to fish on August 28th, both anglers must have fished at least one Tuesday night tournament in 2010.
With an average of 11 boats per event this season, the pot should be over $1200 by August 28th; and with a 50/30/20 split into the top three places, the winners will walk away with close to $1000 if 20 teams show up to fish the Saturday tournament. Not too shabby for a $40 price of admission! But we still have some real opportunities to end all that with a big girl being caught. Speaking of, the River City Grille Big Bass Rollover starts at $935 next week! Looking at some of the bass brought to the scales this week, it may be wise to get off the couch and come on out.