Up on Grand this week for the FLW Costa tournament and going around a boat house and see this goose on the foam float, then I see this little yellow thing peeking out from under mom...I love this picture!

Got to spend a day this week on Lake Toho in Florida with my friend Tony Ferreira. We caught a bunch of fish and this thing, which he kept trying to get me to lip....

To quasi-quote Napoleon Dynamite "I caught you a delicious gator". For all my PETA friends the little guy and I parted ways with both of us in good health and with all our fingers and toes intact.

As promised in a prior blog my newest article "Lessons Learned and Finally Applied" was published today on Gary Yamamoto's magazine Inside Line.  The article discusses my practice and actual tournament days at the FLW Costa series tournament a few weeks ago, I hope you enjoy the read.

Fun times by all on Toledo for the past few weekends. Starting with Bass Champs we had water in the high 50's and low 60's, fished staged up over the grass. I found multiple groups of fish that I could catch a lot of ways, but the most effective was with an A-rig using Yamamoto Zako's. I fished Bass Champs by myself as Dicky was fishing the BFL on Rayburn and caught a respectable 16 lbs, but a couple pounds shy of getting paid. I will tell you that had this been a MLF tournament I could have easily broken the 100 pound mark, by 11:00 I had most of my weight, I easily had 30 fish in the high 2 1/2 - 3 pound class and another 20 keepers, was a spectacular day of fun fishing.

Next weekend we went back for the Texas Team trail and tried to start on the same groups of fish. Twenty minutes into the morning I counted 61 boats that I could see within a half mile of us, including 10 that were within a 3 iron of us. Lots and lots of folks found those fish as they were community hole fish in the 6 mile and Housen areas. We slid around between the boats and caught a couple of small limits, but it became obvious we needed to get away from the boats, which meant getting away from the grass. We moved north up Toledo a few miles and started fishing main lake ridges leading into spawning bays or flats. The BITE of the day was the 7 1/2 in my right hand, caught on a 1 oz black/blue football jig, 15 # Seaguar on a 7'6" Lew's MH rod. The actual rod is called a Carolina Rig rod, but I love it for big football jigs, good can throw them a mile and it's got just the right amount of backbone to get a hook in fish, even when like this one they are 50-60 yards out when you pull on them. Total weight of just under 20 lbs, good enough for a $2,250 paycheck.