Texas Walleye Association Championship June 26-27, 2004

by Brian Stangel

Thursday June 24th

Picked up Wheels at the airport late Thursday after driving through a thunderstorm on the way to Amarillo, it definitely kept me awake. Wheels had a fun flight through the storm in a dual prop puddle jumper so I guess I didn’t have it so bad. After leaving the Amarillo airport, we headed to Fritch and went down to the marina to see if we could get some licenses and I wanted to show Wheels the fish house. It was a short trip as the marina was closed, but one that Wheels won’t ever forget.

Friday June 25th

We headed out pretty early Friday morning, but not as early as we had wanted to. The weather at 5:10 was rainy and cold so we waited a little longer and were on the water by around 7. It was a very slow day but we covered a lot of water with a variety of jigs, spinners, rigs and cranks.

Near the end of the day we were able to put some fish in the boat outside of the main lake humps that everyone fishes this time of year, but I wasn’t real excited as the jig bite had not made itself known and I had a sinking feeling we needed to be able to jig up a limit and then try our other techniques.

As we were heading in we decided to try our luck at trolling even though I had swore I would never troll Meredith ever in the past, I had to do it again. It figures that within 45 minutes we were able to pick up 3 ‘eyes all on a Crawdad Frenzy deep diver. We were still going with our program as Wheels had caught 3 fish rigging out on the humps and that was the technique for tourney day.

Saturday June 26th

Tourney day, we were boat 1 and we thought we would be able to hit the humps first and get our lines in the water before anyone else … NOT. Texeye in his new Tundra and Jeff Alexander in his Triton both came flying by us and pulled up on the spot first. Not wanting to be too obnoxious, we moved in behind them, still casting distance away and proceeded to watch them both limit out in a matter of minutes while we were struggling for some fish, heck, any fish.

We fished the spot along with many others for the day and died on the spot. We had 2 fish to show for it and we each caught one of them. After weigh-in, we went back and tied all the jigging rods up and were determined to vertical jig instead of rigging on Day 2. Another mistake…

Sunday June 29th

We were last today and after sending everybody off (I’ll apologize again for the poor execution of this task) we headed out to the humps. There were boats on them again, but today we saw 2 fish caught in total and that was it. We were determined not to die on the spot again and that was one of our better decisions. Hitting multiple other spots with jigs and cranks, we finally tied on some spinners and went bottom bouncing. Trying to cover some water, we were working 20-25 FOW with 3 oz bbs at 1.5. Wheels was questioning my speed, but I was confident enough that I was willing to take the chance and run the speed. We finally found a hump holding some fish and each of us hooked up, nothing big, but they would both measure. Immediately realizing this may be our only chance we doubled back right away and hit it a few more times to no avail.

Continuing on down the lake, we were not able to hook up again and tried another spot pulling spinners, jigged the humps again and went back to the only spot we had caught fish, we came up empty and a storm was fast approaching so we called it and went to weigh-in with 2 fish again, it was painful, but we gave it a good effort.

Wheels I’m pretty sure will never fish south of CO ever again as his experiences have come on some of the toughest bites. Hopefully that will not stop him from coming back to the Butte for some Striper fishing.

Tight lines,

Brian