laKe san antonio
The largemouth will spawn later than the small- mouth so remember where you caught the male smallmouth, then the female smallmouth, next will come the male largemouth and finally the big female largemouth show up. Come around the full moon in March to find smallmouth and be here in april to target the largemouth.
let it sit and i could feel it get heavy. i set the hook and up comes the biggest largemouth i have ever seen in San antonio lake. as i grabbed for the net it made one of those headshake wallows that big fish do and before i could get the net under the fish it dove to the bottom and my drag began to buzz. The fish made a couple runs out to deep water and soon my dobyns 743s spinning rod had her coming toward the boat. i slid her into the net. My heart was pounding and my hands were shaking as i stood there looking at a big female largemouth that went just over 8-lbs on my scale. This was the first bite of the day and a great way to start a tournament i was competing in solo. i was able to catch four more small fish to fill out my tournament limit by about 10:00 a.m.; although the largemouth was the only big pre spawn bass i could catch. later in the day the water warmed into the mid ‘50s and the ripbait bite turned on. i was able to cull smaller fish four times with my suspending Smith- wick rattlin’ rouge. My final weight on the tourna- ment scale was 17-pounds even, and my big fish was 8.10 pounds.
recently fishing an aBa team tournament here i found the smallmouth bucks were on the beds; but they were alone. i knew this meant the females were staging somewhere just outside and the largemouth were behind them in the early stages of prespawn. With limited practice information, i decided to fish outside areas and leave the inside bedding areas and those small bucks to other anglers. i didn’t get a good draw so when my number was called to blast off i was following what looked like the whole field down the lake. Moving into the Harris Creek arm of the lake where there is more standing timber than in other area of the lake, i thought i would find that bass are holding on to the wood. as i approached the arm every boat turned right into the creek, causing a change in my plans. Heading toward the dam, i went into the only other significant creek arm - Bee rock cove. it’s much smaller with just a few standing trees in it. There was only one boat ahead of me and they went all the way to the back so i had all the outside points and holding areas to myself. in a half hour, the north side produced no bites. a steeper rocky point caught my attention on the south side. The cove is home to many standing trees and this where i planned to concentrate my casts. With Structure Scan on the sidescan mode show- ing on one of my lowrance HdS units, i noticed the right sidescan screen showing a sunken standing tree. although i captured the image with my lowrance, the invisibility of the object above the water made it a less targeted spot and i maximized on this with the fea- tures available on the lowrance. Hitting my arrow keys, i moved my cursor to the right and placed it on the tree. This let me know the distance from the object was from my transducer. it was 15-feet off the deep side of the boat. i pitched my YUM dinger rigged wacky about a boat length away from where the tree should’ve been and let it sink to the bottom. i shook it a couple times,
TOURNAMENT INFO
i won the tournament; because i targeted ar- eas where i had a chance to catch pre spawn female bass. This is where the importance of remembering the progression of species and gender in the staging process. The tree i caught the big fish on was in 23-feet of water and most of the entrants in this tournament had 10- to 12-lbs of buck smallmouth caught off beds in less than 5-feet of water and without my low- rance Structure Scan on the trolling motor i would have gone right by that submerged tree without a cast; therefore i wouldn’t have had a chance at that big bass. My $599 lSS-1 was responsible for the $3,425 first place finish. That’s a good return on an invest- ment! our rods, reels, boat, motor, tow vehicle and the rest of the stuff we collect are an investment in the pursuit of our passion. if you remember the tips here you too could have a day like i did on San antonio lake. Someone always catches a good limit of bass on any given day. God decided it was my turn on March 10, 2012.
KEYS TO SUCESS
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