September and October Fishing

Wow! Coyote Bait and Tackle, Galaxie Marine, and CBAF events have kept me quite busy. I haven’t been on the water much this summer and I haven’t fished a couple of these lakes in almost three and a half years. Let’s say I was a little surprised at how different each lake has fished during these months. My ten year old son Hunter and I started out our first tournament this year fishing the Coyote Bait and Tackle two day event. First day you had to make the top ten to qualify to the next day. Well we started off by showing up at Anderson Reservoir parking lot and my son bailing out of the car to go say hi to Denise the owner of Coyote Bait and Tackle. Denise and her staff have treated my son and I like we were a part of their family. Hunter started playing in the back of their shop with the live bait since he was three or four years old. He has made many friends that buy their fishing gear from Denise. Well getting back to the tournament. We just got in the boat and went fishing. We ended up catching three limits of bass and Hunter caught his first drop shot fish. We started out throwing top water and went to deep water techniques to get over three limits. We just didn’t catch the right size fish that day. The winning teams started out either top water or went deep right off the bat. I quess it was location. We didn’t have alot of time to figure them out but it seems as though we did the right thing. The top ten teams went on the next day to fish Calero which is located in the Morgan Hill foothills. Hunter went for a trail ride with his grandfather and his horses and I went to Calero to see what I could do to help out. I got on this body of water after all the boats went out and started to fish deep like we did at Anderson. There was a fleet of boats fishing in one general area and everyone was fishing deep. It was great to see how this event was going to turn out. The last time I was on that body of water I was fishing with Bernie Kroen from Morgan Hill and I caught a ten pounder on top water the same time of year. When the weigh in started I was amazed at the number of limits. Every team weighed in a limit of fish. The winners however weren’t fishing deep. They caught all their winning fish over twenty pounds on Snag Proof Frogs. We left that event and went to Oroville we just went fishing. I spent a week on a house boat there again this summer and my time on that water has helped alot. This time I was fishing with my new team partner Tim Dotson and we started off with Spooks and then went deep. We finished in the middle of the pack. We weren’t fishing deep enough. The winners were in fifty feet and deeper. The next day Tim and I went to Folsom Lake and fished the Galaxie Marine tournament. Neither of us had been on that lake since spring and at the end of the event we blank. I didn’t feel to bad half the field blank and the winners had something like seventeen pounds. It is truly amazing how different each body of water fishes and how different this fall is compared to years past. Once again I was bless with the opportunity to get out for another day on the water.