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Story 2005 Town Lake in December

Page history last edited by Jerome Moisand 16 years, 1 month ago

Back from Town Lake

When	December 5th to 13th, 2005
Where	Town Lake, Austin, TX
Who	Fishing with Bob Giordano

The story

One full week of fishing Town Lake… Nobody else on the lake… Quite a dream for any carp angler… So here is what happened to AF Bob and myself during this memorable week of intensive carp fishing.

I arrived Mon morning, and started by visiting this huge Cabelas store on I-35 (exit 220). The fishing tank is real nice, a hefty bass (15lb?) roaming in it, beautiful gars, nice trouts as well, but sadly no carp, only a baby buff. I’d love to see a 30+ carp roaming in there… Quite some fishing gear on this store! I ended up buying a 9 feet TICA rod to replace my old Fox rod which broke in GA.

I had a car rented from Avis (CAG coupon saved me one day of rental), I stayed on the Wellesley Inn (20% discount on the room thanks to my CAG membership), most of my bait & tackle came from Wacker and Boilie Shop (discounts again), CAG membership does pay off! Many thanks to our membership director (Neil)!

Mon PM saw me fishing later afternoon and catching my first fish, a hefty 26 pounder. Good start! Nothing at all on Tue, except a 21lb which saved the day. Kind of disappointing, I had worked a LOT in the afternoon to prepare for an evening session at the spot where I caught my PB after the ATC’05.

And then the TX weather (which appears to be even less predictable than MA weather) kicked in… We quickly reached the freezing point and below. Wed was fishing-less, the weather was awful, plus Bob’s plane arrived 4 hours late because of iced engines. On Thu, we started by fishing behind the hotel, and found a giant bottle of champagne to celebrate our soon-to-come big fish! Next, we went fishing the warm water discharge, but barely did more than freeze our butts, aside from me catching one of the smallest carp of Town Lake (5/6lb).

I have to say that our morale on Fri wasn’t too high, kind of proportional with the air temperature... We fished several known good spots without any results. We checked the warm water discharge, but it wasn’t warm any more. Bob had an interesting idea, and we fished a while behind the dam, assuming some fish must fall over and stay stuck. But nah, nothing.

We finally moved to a spot close to the big power plant & softball fields, and oh miracle, I started to catch! Amazingly, I ended up with THREE 26 pounders this evening. Now this sounds pretty good, but I was actually a tiny bit frustrated. I had come to Texas to do better than my intensive autumnal fishing of the M’mack river, where I hoped to catch a 30+ and stopped at 26-8lb… Now, here I am in Town Lake, with FOUR 26 pounders so far! Poor Bob didn’t have such issue though, all he landed was a small catfish!

On Sat, I had decided to stay in Texas a bit longer. The news from MA (15 inches of snow!) were not very exciting, and I didn’t feel that the trip was satisfying enough so far. Plus we seemed to be on a good school of fish. On Sat morning, same spot, bite is slow, but I landed a 27lb and Bob caught a 25lb, nice!

We tried various spots during the day, nothing. So after some errands, we were back to our favorite spot very late in the day, and oh yeah, baby, I caught my 30 pounder (31lb), several 20 pounders and a few smaller ones. Now this is FUN! Er… At least for me… Bob is a very nice guy and a great fishing companion, but playing net man was starting to make him a bit itchy…

Sun morning was a test of the gazebo swim which I had never fished before. This is truly a beautiful spot with lots of structure and depth changes. I landed a couple of decent fish, but then it stopped.

So we decided to start a big baiting campaign at our favorite evening swim. Since we didn’t have many boilies left, we improvised a bit, using several pounds of rabbit pellets, quite a few pounds of regular corn soaked in corn syrup, and several pounds of this Hominy corn stuff soaked as well. Man, spodding is SO tedious… I’m going to buy a bait boat one of these days… After a few hours, nothing much to report. Bob, close to commit suicide, took a walk to relax a bit and I kept thinking “what’s wrong, MrJ?” while hearing fish jump from time to time. And then I realized that the corn syrup has quite a strong smell, so fishing boilies close to it might not be the best idea…

So back to a good old method ball loaded with soaked syrupy corn, and the same soaked corn on the hook! Well, 7 fish this night rewarded our efforts with multiple twenties, and Bob's spirits were suddenly lifted when a 31lb paid him a visit at the very end of the evening! So we were tied for the big fish, result that wouldn’t change until the end. Those Town Lake fish can be feisty on the landing mat as you can see, this 31lb really wanted to go back to the water by itself…

On Mon, Bob had to go to work, but I was back at dawn, without much sleep in-between, thinking that the school of fish might still be there. Nothing happened for a while, but then a slow take, a nice fight and… hey, I caught my 2nd buffalo ever! A low twenty, but this one really made my day! Except that getting a decent pic with a self-timer camera, and a fish which insists on bolting wasn’t easy! Then I started to play around with my rigs, shortening the hair, switching to running rigs, hoping to get more buffs, but this ended up giving me two nice carp (a teen and a low 20), and fantastic fighters.

Around noon, I finally moved my (tired) butt to the 360 bridge as an attempt to get a bigger buff, but the place was dead.

So back to our favorite swim, where I started to heavily bait again, soon joined by Bob who came with a nice dinner, but had to quickly drop it to the floor since I got a take seconds after he arrived! I dumped most of my boilies in a small corner, a move that would give me two fish, and we caught 5 or 6 relatively small ones on our soaked corn. No 20+ this time though, but a “humpback carp” for me… And all of them fighting very nicely. Around midnight, we finally gave up, after 18 hours of fishing for me and my entire body hurting like hell (in addition of being very smelly).

Overall, a challenging trip, many hours of hard fishing, numerous 20s (16 for me, I believe), a buff and two 31lb… Even if we didn’t get any super biggie, I think we can characterize this trip as a success! And Bob still has a few evenings to go…

One final word about bait. I caught on Boilie Shop pinapple and scopex boilies, but soaking them in glug was definitely needed. What did impress me (and landed my 31lb) was the egg & milk boilie, where a single boilie in non-pre-baited areas proved to be effective. Bill, you’re on something with this egg & milk recipe. Pescaviva + method gave me a couple of fish, but nothing exciting. Corn soaked in syrup + method ball did well, with a mix of small and big fish (including Bob’s 31lb). On average, I’d say that boilies did catch bigger fish and corn did catch more fish, but I’m still not fully convinced by this theory…