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DELTA GET TOGETHER
By: Ron Wilson
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Good grub and good friends |
August 7, 2009.... I spent a few days
fishing for black bass with friends around Franks Tract last week. It
used to be the annual Keeper Worms Pro Staff Event but since Judy Clark
turned the 25 year old Keeper Worm business over to her son Rob the
business has gone to hell.
He called all the pro staff after just
one year of running the business to cancel the annual event held at
Sugar Barge (http://www.sugarbarge.com/rvpark.html)
but since we all had camp places reserved and vacation times booked we
decided to meet there and have our usual fun and get together without
the Keeper Worm sponsorship.
Everyone fixes a dish and brings it to a
community table so the variety of food was great, the camaraderie
excellent and the weather while a little breezy was nice even thou the
rest of the valley was burning up.
The down side of the outing was that
Norval Pimentel and Jim
Clark went out fishing together Thursday after Jim had a bug that
put him on his back and in bed Monday and he then somehow transferred it
to Norval who spent two days flat on his back in his motor home.
Needless to say we told them that from now on when they go fishing
together one has to wear lipstick so that we would know who was kissing
who. Norval might laugh about it now but after two days of sickness it
wasn’t funny to him then.
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Quen with a couple of Delta lunkers |
To say the
black bass fishing
was tough would be an understatement. The pros were lucky to boat a
limit of fish during a day on the water.
If there would have been a tournament it
would have been hard to say who would of won but Carol and I would of
butted heads again I bet. Her punching the thick stuff and me beating
the heck out of the rip-rap trying to put a 15 pound bag in the boat.
Since the central part of Franks Tract
area was killed of weeds a couple years ago I haven't been able to find
those 25 to 30 pound sacks of fish like I did in years past. This year I
found nothing inside Franks to speak of.
On the first morning of fishing doctor
Quen Young of San
Francisco and I headed south to the lower end of Franks Tract to
fish our usual tule patches we usual find fish in. It didn’t take long
to find out that the fish were not there. We moved to the rock wall and
picked up a half dozen fish. At least we were putting a pattern
together.
The wind started picking up as the tide
started going out and I told Quen that it was time for us to leave as
there would soon be 3 to 6 foot swells rolling through the area as the
tide got stronger.
We headed back north to the tulles and
the protection from the wind behind them but no fish there so we moved
to the rock wall in the main channel.
On the first little patch of tulles I
caught 3 bass and Quen caught one. A Pattern, no not really, the fish
were just off the rocks and as we went down the rock wall we would catch
one here and there. The fish would bite a senko with a chartreuse tail
or a crawdad pattern worm whacky rigged and shaken. The bites were not
aggressive but just a tick and then let it sit there and they would swim
off with it.
We caught all our fish off of rocks
during our 3 days of fishing and the main reason for that was I was
trying to hide from the wind as much as possible. My little 12 volt
motor could only handle so much wind and current. The best bait was a 6
inch crawdad pattern worm whacky rigged thrown on the inside of the
weeds near the rocks around
high tide.
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We boated several nice bass like this
one |
Thursday was a 15 fish day. Friday was a
12 fish day and Saturday we had just 3 bites that resulted in one fish
boated before Quen called it a day by 9 a.m. Quen was celebrating his
birthday so he took home a bucketful of fish for a few dinners for him,
his kids and grandkids.
The annual get together of renewing our
old friendships on a yearly basis is a great way to catch up on what has
happened over the year. There are no more kids tournaments as almost all
the kids have grown and we are now faced with grandkids that have grown
so we have a lot to gossip about. I guess we have recessed into that
rocking chair stage
of life reliving the past good times and trying to enjoy the present
with a lot of old friends and being thankful that we are all still on
the right side of the grass.
Will there be a annual get together next
year at Sugar Barge of old fishing friends for fun, food and fishing.
You bet we have spaces reserved already so that we can once again use
our motor homes that we take out of storage at least once a year for a
camping outing to bullshit and just have a great get together. |
