I have to admit, I’m really stumped on how the Lake Havasu Elite Series event turned out for me.
Coming off a ninth-place finish at the California Delta the week before, I brought a lot of momentum into the Arizona lake. This was my first time on Havasu, and from the start I liked what I saw there.
This was by far the prettiest place I’ve ever fished, and the fishing really wasn’t that hard. I think it just came down to timing and fishing pressure.
My first day of practice was outstanding. I settled on an area up the Colorado River and flipped reeds with a YUM Christie Critter. I didn’t set the hook a lot, but the water was so clear, I could see the quality of fish when they’d swim out of the reeds before spitting my bait.
The second day of practice, I spent more time looking around, but I still got enough bites to feel comfortable with a good pattern for the tournament. The first day of the tournament I got 10 bites, and the second day I got five.
I stuck with that flipping pattern the whole time because that’s one of my strengths. The way practice went I didn’t want try a lot of different things because I knew that two back-to-back flips could produce two 4-pounders.
Unfortunately, it just didn’t turn out that way for me. I bet on that horse and it didn’t win. That’s what happens sometimes when you get tunnel vision.
This is also a good example of how practice doesn’t really mean a whole heck of a lot once the tournament starts. I’ve had some really good practices and some really poor finishes. At the Delta, I didn’t have a good practice at all, but I made the Top 12.
You can’t always run on what happens in practice, but I honestly didn’t think I’d have trouble getting bit during the tournament on Havasu. The lake is full of fish and even though it isn’t that big (19,300 acres), it fishes big. It has a lot of islands, backwaters, pockets and offshore structure.
I just think I got in a bad rotation. I feel like in the tournament, I was fishing behind somebody all the time. Even though I didn’t see them, I didn’t feel like I was fishing any fresh water.
One of the things I liked about Lake Havasu was that I didn’t have those long runs of an hour-and-a-half each way that I had on the Delta. I burned like 10 gallons of gas the entire tournament. I committed to a 10-mile stretch of the river and it backfired.
That’s disappointing, but despite missing the cut, I enjoyed my first trip to Lake Havasu. I think, as the top finishers proved, the lake has a lot more quality than I happened to find in the tournament.
The most challenging element, I think, was the clarity. You’d be going down a stretch of bank and you’d see a bush or a patch of reeds and you’d say “I can see the bottom and there’s not a fish up there.” But then you’d flip over there and sometimes there would be one there.
The clear water kind of works on a guy like me. On one hand, you could fish faster and cover a lot more water with it being clear like that.
Of course, the other side of that deal is the need for a stealthy approach. If those fish weren’t underneath something, they would see you coming even before you could make the cast.
It’s funny, now that I look back at this Western leg of the Elite series, I’m pleased with the overall outcome. Even though I had a poor finish at Havasu, if you had told me before I headed across the dessert that I was going to go to fish two water bodies I’d never been to and come back with a 10-12 point jump in the Toyota Bassmaster Angler of the Year standings, I’d take it.
So even though Havasu wasn’t a success, the trip was a success.
Now, it’s nice to be back home for a while. The timing is good because my two youngest daughters are out of school, so we’re all going to have what we call a Christie rock concert. That’s where we go out and pick up rocks in the yard so they don’t tear up the lawnmower.
I saw a lot of rocks in the desert, but I like the ones back home the best.