Bayou Outdoors tourney 23 Jan 2021

[BassmanRudy]

A buddy and I fished their tourney(usually tied to the boat show but can't do that this year...). Weather was pretty yucky with it staying overcast, windy and spitting rain most of the day. Out of the 9 possible lakes we chose Brandy Branch. Turns out there were 2 other tourneys out there so launching and recovering the boat ate up a lot of time lol. We started off playing circles with other boats in the discharge and had no luck but saw a few fish get landed. We then went to the cold side where I was hoping to punch but the water is way higher than in Oct and the mats are at least 2-3' below the water. So just fished until we started seeing some beds and wellp they had some fish on em! Mostly males but we did see a big female or 2 swimming around. We caught our first 2 keepers(males) and then just kept rotating thru the beds seeing if a female had came up yet. My buddy and I both kept harassing 1 female til she bit and he kept her from wrapping around a log but then halfway to the boat she just came off. I was reaching for the net and didn't see what happened just heard him groan. We did see her come back later on but she wouldn't bite. The cloudy conditions and ripples on the water sure made it hard to see even with the water being super clear. We tried a few different lens colors(always heard brown was best in tbe clouds?) and didn't seem to really matter. We were spotting beds in 10' of water along grass lines but it wasn't until we were on top of them which caused them to spook off. Overall though catching bedding fish in January was Fun and we had 2 fish for 5.5lbs overall. Tourney paid to 7.7lbs so we just missed out. 66 total teams competed and 14lbs won it with a 8lber! 2 fish deal for clarification. No pics as it was cold and didn't want to fumble with the phone. Water temp was 75° on the discharge side and 60-64° on the cold side.

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[Mike Cork]

Thanks for the report Rudy, awesome to be able to bed fish in January. Shame about loosing the big one, looks like it would have put you in a check for sure.

[BassmanRudy]

Thanks Mike. Things like that happen out there. What's crazy is about 2 hours before she hit his bait I pitched an orange trick worm in there and she delicately picked it up just behind the hook and swam it off the nest! Like so clear we saw it and setting the hook wouldn't have done any good.

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