Toledo Bend Update...McDonald's Big Bass Ideas

Posted by ken on May 16, 2017

As promised last week here's what happened at Bass Champs on Toledo Saturday. As I told you in last weeks blog we made the decision to stay deep on Saturday and try to win, or at least get a top 5. So we started the day just above the Pendelton bridge on a main lake ridge that neither of us had fished in several years. Even though there was a lot of bait and what appeared to be fish eating them on our Humminbird, we left there after about 45 minutes with one missed football jig bite. I will note that as we were headed that way one of the teams that finished in the top three for the tournament headed even further north than we did, so I suspect one of the top three stringers was from the north end of the lake. We left there and went all the way to 1215 in a 10-20 mph wind, and the only thing we learned there was that a Ranger Z521 really does handle big water well....so we decided to see how it ran with a trailing sea and ran back down to the midlake area two hours in and with no fish in the livewell. We spent the rest of the day fishing 10-18 feet deep on main lake ridges from Pendelton down to Indian Mounds and were able to catch maybe a dozen keepers through the day, which is a really slow day on Toledo, for 14.7 pounds. We did see two of the other top 10 teams fishing the same areas and similar depths to what we were, mainlake, mid-depth. Interestingly the week before I caught 14 pounds and 11 ounces in the BFL, which 14.7 pounds equates to 14 pounds and 11 ounces, so apparently no matter what we do on Toledo we can't catch 15 pounds. I will say you could have knocked me over with a feather when we found out that won us $600, which is I think exactly what I said in last weeks blog we were NOT trying to win. But we gambled, didn't catch a top 5 stringer, and still got paid.  Mostly because of one 4-5 lber I was able to catch on a Carolina Rig. So for those of you going to Toledo I will say the 5 pounder last week and our big fish this week both came from 10-15 feet of water, so if I were going to try to catch a big one I would focus on that depth. This week's big fish came on a little known Yamamoto bait called a California Roll in color 301, which I think is one of the best dragging baits on the market. it is a really small profile bait, which seemed to be what we got the most bites on, so I'd stay in that depth range with smaller profile baits. I wouldn't get too hung up on the area of the lake as these two weekends we fished over a 20 mile range, just get in an area you have confidence in, know that the bite is pretty tough, and keep a bait in the water....good luck to all in the  McDonald's and please be careful!