Brushy Creek Open 2017

Brushy Creek FRUSTRATES me to no end!!!

I have said that before and will almost always say it again in the next year or two.  However, I am excited about our finish this weekend.  Sure it was 8th… Sure it was out of the money but if you break it down here is why I am excited.

First off I haven’t fished that lake at all this year and I may not have even fished it last year.  Secondly, it was a tough day.  There were seven teams that didn’t weigh a fish.  Now, I do know that some guys wont weigh fish when they know they aren’t going to win but still there were eight teams that DID weigh fish that we beat.

Should we have done better? You bet!  Brad had a keeper hooked that, for whatever reason, came unbutton as she tried to jump.  Wasn’t even a full jump too. When I saw it shake it’s head, it sure looked like it had both trebles of his crankbait in her mouth good.  But stuff happens.  I know that fish would have been easily 2 lbs and more than likely 3 lbs.  That would have jumped us up to 6th.  But add that and a fish that I know was a keeper, that completely missed my frog to our bag and things change. This fish jumped completely out of the water, so I got a good look at it.  Add another conservative 2 lbs and now we are in 4th if not 3rd place if it weighed more.   Maybe I’m trying to make myself feel like we did better than we did or that there was a chance but I do feel we were close and as always left feeling encouraged.

I can tell you that the pattern that we had success with was a top water frog.  A white Spro Bronzeye (favorite frog period).  All the fish we caught seemed to be on little cheese patches.  You had to get your frog on the shore or right on the edge and then work it out and the fish ALWAYS would hit in the last 3rd of that cheese mat.   A few really small ones in an actual grass mats but the cheese was the deal and it seemed these mats next to channel swings were the best.  Again we maybe could have done better if we could find more areas like this but we had this pattern clearly to ourselves.

The coolest part of this tournament was catching a tagged Bass.  Andrea Sylvia of Iowa State’s Department of Natural Resource Ecology & Management, who was onsite tagging new bass, was very nice and emailed the details of my tagged bass, Bass #4898.  It was initially tagged on 6/25/17 and was 15.6″ and 2.2lbs. This was its first recorded recapture on 9/24/17 and he was 16.1″ and 2.35lbs.  Pretty cool to learn the growth in that short of time and I’m anxious to see more info from their study.

You can follow their blog here:  http://isulmbstudy.weebly.com/

Alright enough of that… Fishing is over and its time to hunt!! Bring on the Wyoming Antelope and then back for our Iowa Whitetails!!!