I just got back from my first trip to Falcon since we’ve had a break in the Elite Series, and it was a good one! But, there aren’t many bad trips to Falcon. I got to go with Baylor Bears basketball head coach Scott Drew, who’s an exceptional fisherman and a good friend. We don’t get to fish much together because my offseason is his basketball season, and his offseason is my fishing season.
He wound up catching his personal best bass three times over, the biggest being a 9-8 (see the photo). It ate a Bomber Fat Free Shad.
Falcon is about 31 feet low, so basically the bushes have about 4 feet of water in them, but this is a good thing for the lake, not necessarily for the fishing. When it gets superlow like this, the shoreline vegetation gets a chance to grow up a bit, and when it floods again, there is all kinds of new cover for the fish to use. Normally when a lake is down, the fish concentrate, but that’s not the case here, they spread out and suspend, so fishing can be tough. We usually catch 100-200 fish a day, but this trip we caught about 40 the first two days and then 75 the last day (our best five went 44-8!). For the lake to fill up, we need a good tropical storm to roll in around August and hang out over the Mexican mountains, which in turn fills the lake up.
A funny thing happened, and I wish I had a photo of it. There are a lot of gill net fishermen on the Mexican side, and we were idling out of a cove over there when I hit one of the nets. No problem, I thought, I’ll just throw it in reverse and the net will untangle itself. Wrong! I had close to two hours to shoot the photo because that’s how long Coach drew was in knee-deep water with a pair of scissors snipping away at the net. It was destroyed
Speaking of Falcon, Little Alton fished the Bass Champs there recently and he and his partner caught 23.54 pounds in a three-fish limit, and that only got 20th place! While that’s an 8-pound average, the winners had just shy of a 10-pound average, weighing more than 29 pounds and change.
On a more serious note, about three months ago I was diagnosed with a blood condition called hemochromatosis. It’s a condition where your blood has too much iron in it because it can’t effectively rid itself of all the iron. It’s like the opposite of being anemic, I’m “the man of iron,” you could say!
I’ve had symptoms for 8 or 10 years, and while it can be a serious condition, it’s not since I get treated for it regularly. I had mild dizziness, numbness in my fingertips and toes and other things, but I now get blood drawn every two weeks or so to dilute the amount of iron in my blood. Then as my body makes more blood, the iron levels go back down until I have too much then need to get drained again. It’s a minor inconvenience.
But, I don’t want to alarm anyone, just keep you all informed!