Ehrler’s Edge – Road home from TTBC

I’ve just finished fishing the PAA Toyota Bass Classic on Lake Conroe in Texas. It was a great experience and I think I learned quite a bit at this event. The PAA did a really good job with the tournament which started off with a pro am and then concluded with a two day event and a final third day with the top 10 anglers.

The pro am event was a pretty neat deal. The PAA invited their sponsors to be co-anglers with the pros for a day on the water. I was lucky enough to get to fish with a couple of guys from Oakley (sunglasses) during the pro am. I’ve been working with Oakley for a couple years and to get a few of their people out on the water with me made for a fun day on the water. We had a blast fishing and telling stories all day. It was basically a pre-fish day for me and I was able to find a few spots that would help out during the tournament.

As for the tournament itself, I am not satisfied with my performance. Things got started out pretty rough because in the weeks leading up to it I was very busy with the FLW Cup on Lake Lanier, the BASS Northern open event and the final FLW Western Series event on Lake Roosevelt. With those events on my mind I really didn’t think to much about the Toyota Texas Bass Classic and by the time I started to think about it I missed the pre-practice period and could not pre-fish or obtain any information on the lake from others. This was a big mistake and really hurt my chances.

Arriving at Lake Conroe I had a plan to pre-fish deep for an hour and then go shallow for an hour until I started to find a pattern. After three of four switches (from deep to shallow and back) I started to see that I would get bit shallow and there wasn’t much happening deep. So after the first day, I moved my entire focus to the docks on the bank. Fishing a Lucky Craft RC 2 I focused on sea-walls and docks. I really liked the RC 2 over the RC 1.5, probably the best shallow crankbait for any lake, because the extra weight helped me to to make precision casts in small pockets around docks. I wrapped the tournament up in 30th place which is not what I had hoped for but, I did learn a lot.

This week I am heading to the National Guard FLW Collegiate regionals at Folsom Lake in Northern California. What a great deal for these young men and women to have an opportunity like this to start a fishing career or simply to enjoy this great sport while they get their education. I am really looking forward to meeting and talking with a lot of these young anglers and offering my support to them, the National Guard and FLW.