Back in early April, I fished what has to be one of the greatest bass fisheries in the world.Falcon Lake is on the Rio Grande River in southwest Texas, near the town of Zapata, which is a nice place. Holiday Inn Express. Some nice mom-and-pop businesses. A great fishery. Just about everything you could want for a place to take a fishing trip.
The BASS Elite Series fished Falcon Lake, and the record books suffered. It was the most unbelievable tournament I’ve ever fished.
Here’s what I mean.
• The first day, I had more than 30 pounds, including a bass heavier than eight pounds. I hardly got any applause at the weigh-in, and they didn’t even weigh my big fish.
• I thought it would take two days of 20-pound bags to make the first cut — 10 fish that weighed 40 pounds. Instead, it took two days of 25 pounds per day. To average five pounds per fish for two days and just barely make the cut; that’s phenomenal. The cut at 50th place was at 49-7, and there were 44 guys who had more than 50 pounds — half the field! It took a 7-1/2- to 8-pound average to break into the top 10. The big fish among the pros for the tournament was 13-2.
• The top six finishers all broke the BASS record for a 4-day tournament with a 5-bass limit. Paul Elias won with 132-8, Terry Scroggins had 132-4, Byron Velvick had 131-15, Aaron Martens had 129-7, Mark Davis had 128-15 and Scott Rook had 125-10. Think about that. You could break the all-time record and finish sixth? That’s insane. The old record was 122-14 at Clear Lake in California last spring.
• All 12 of the finalists on the last day wound up with more than 100 pounds.
• Terry Scroggins almost broke the all-time single day record, and he did it on the fourth day of the tournament, on a spot he’d been fishing for three days. He had 44-4. He had four fish between nine and 10 pounds, and one 6-pounder. He said he had another fish on that was about the size of his four biggest ones, but he jumped him off. If he’d caught that fish, he’d have shattered the record.
• The top co-angler broke the all-time co-angler record with a 4-day catch of 83-13 — from the back of the boat! The co-angler big fish of the tournament was 10-13.
• And here’s the kicker. We got there during the post-spawn period, not the prespawn, when the fish are so much bigger. There’s no telling what it would have been like if we’d been there in March.
And this is not some new lake that’s just coming into its own, at its most-fertile stage, with all kinds of fish popping up. Falcon, which covers almost 80,000 acres, was impounded in 1954. Some of the Texas guys had been talking about how good the lake is, but most of the talk about great fisheries the past few years has centered on some of the other lakes in Mexico. Falcon has got to be as good as any of those lakes.
I knew the tournament was going to be good. I went and pre-practiced, and it was easy to catch a 5-fish, 20-pound limit. A Stren Series tournament had just been there, and there had been 32 bass caught that weighed more than 10 pounds. Now, I’ve been in a lot of tournaments, and the most 10-pound fish I’ve ever seen weighed in was something like eight. I know that in most tournaments in South Carolina or North Carolina, if they’re held in February or March, if you see three 10-pound fish, that’s a great tournament.
I remember the first BASS tournament I ever won, on Alabama’s Lake Eufala in 1994. I thought that was impressive. I remember coming in the first day with 28-2 and being in third place — and that was a prespawn tournament. I was in 16th place at Falcon on the first day with more than 30 pounds — the biggest stringer I’ve ever weighed in.
For the record, I had 30-6 the first day, 23-8 the second and 28-13 the third to finish at 82-11. I finished 17th overall.
So what’s going on at Falcon Lake to make it that awesome? Two things stand out to me: food and cover.
The lake was literally full of baitfish. There were tilapia, shad, bream and crawfish — there was an amazing amount of stuff for bass to eat. But the cover was the real kicker.
There isn’t any grass to speak of, but there are probably more bushes in the water than I’ve seen anywhere in my life. There were bushes from 25 feet deep all the way up to 2-1/2 inches deep. Most of them are mesquite bushes.
There are so many bushes, that I’m sure there are bass in the lake that have never seen a hook, never seen an artificial lure. I think we just caught the bass that were on the outside bushes; there were bushes that had to be full of fish that we had no chance to get to, because the cover was so thick.
I caught fish in the bushes and offshore. I mostly flipped bushes, because that’s the way I like to fish, but I found that I had to move offshore and fish deeper to catch bigger fish — just because they were easier to get to the boat in “sparse” cover than in the thick cover.
And these bass were absolutely the strongest I’ve ever fought. There was one fish I caught the first day, a 6-1/2-pounder. I was flipping, using 65-pound Stren braid, on a 7-1/2-foot, medium-heavy All-Star flipping stick with my drag locked down so tight nothing could move it. I was rigged for anything that could have bit. I didn’t want to give them any line.
Anyway, this fish bit in a mesquite bush, and I reared back and hit him, turned his head in the bush and got him coming up. I mean, when I hit him, I said to myself, “You ain’t gonna get back in that bush.” And that fish turned around and pulled 10 feet of drag like it was nothing — and I still caught it. It was nowhere near my biggest fish, but if it had gotten off, I would have sworn it was a 15-pound fish; it was that strong.
As you can guess, a lot of the pros who fished the tournament want BASS to take us back — maybe even earlier, during the prespawn. I think what happened this time was that these bass had already spawned, had gone through most of the postspawn, and were at that point where they had recovered and were starting to really feed again. You know, the way some lakes in South Carolina fish in late-May, when the bass pull back out on those secondary points, gang up and really start to bite.
The only place I’ve fished that was even close to Falcon was Ray Scott’s private lake in Alabama. I fished a team tournament there with Roland Martin, who has been around a lot longer than I have, and after we fished, I asked him if he’d ever fished anyplace better than Ray’s lake, and he said he hadn’t. I don’t know about Falcon, however. I don’t know that I would give you a quarter for the difference between them. The big thing is, one place is a public lake, and the other is a place where you’ve almost got to be the president of the United States to get an invitation.
Davy Hite is a 43-year-old native of Saluda who lives in Ninety Six. He has fished professionally since 1993. He was the BASS Angler of the Year in 1997 and 2002, and he won the 1999 Bassmasters Classic and the 1998 FLW Tour Champion-ship. He is sponsored by Triton boats, Evinrude outboards, All–Star rods, Pfleuger reels, Berkley Trilene, Yamamoto Baits, Owner hooks and Solar Bat sunglasses.
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