A couple months ago my buddy Grant did something I’ve talked about for years, he bought a boat. It’s a 2007 Tahoe I/O deck boat and is the perfect balance for recreation and fishing. We’ve been testing the local waters over the last few months and recently heard about the hot bass fishing at Clear Lake. We started getting excited and planned a trip the next week. Grant’s neighbor Tim has been out there before and knows the lake fairly well. Grant, Tim and I headed out at 3am on Wednesday morning hoping for an amazing day of fishing.
About halfway into the 2 1/2 hour trip we realized Grant’s truck was drinking like a fish. We burned 3/4 of a 22 gallon tank getting to the lake. No worries, we were there and the fish were waiting. We launched at about 5:45am and headed out to a spot Tim said he caught a 7lb bass on his last trip. Another bass boat sped by us and landed in the spot we planned to fish. We settled for a spot 200 yards beyond and got our lines wet. Clear Lake has some of the most amazing shoreline structure I’ve ever seen. There is an amazing amount of rocks, docks, and vegetation to throw at.
It took about 10 minutes to get the first fish in the boat courtesy of Grant’s brush hog setup. This was Grant’s first time fishing plastics for largemouth. He’s caught his share on hard tackle in Folsom Lake, but plastic fishing is completely different. I was fishing a drop-shot rig with a pumpkin/green fleck Senko. The bite started to heat up and Tim was getting a ton of strikes without any hookups. My Senko rig started producing well and I felt confident with the drop-shot rig. It was my first time with this setup as well.
After catching a couple bass a piece we started to try different areas of the lake. The bite was great and by noon we had a total of 25 fish landed between the three of us.
We stopped off at Kinokti harbor, reloaded the Miller Light and headed back out. By this time the Summer sun was starting to beat down on us. We knew the fishing was going to slow down as the bass retreated from the hot, shallow water. Sure enough, the bites started tapering off. Tapering off at Clear Lake is still a much better bite than we ever see at Folsom and we had a blast. At the end of the day the counts were Grant with 15, Tim with 12 and me with 11. The largest fish of the day was around 3lbs. Considering this was Grant’s first time fishing plastics, he had an amazing day. I can’t wait for our next trip out, but we all agreed the amount of time and gas it takes to get out there deserves a camping trip or some sort of overnight stay so we could get a couple of morning bites and an evening bite in.
The bite of the day was a tie. I tossed a senko drop-shot rig too close to the shore so I reeled it quickly to about 5ft from shore. As I was reeling a bass broke the surface and hammered the Senko! It was an awesome semi-topwater hit. The other contender for bite of the day occurred while Tim was taking a bathroom break on the side of the boat with a brush hog sitting on the bottom. About halfway through, his line took off and he had to set the hook with one hand while trying to finish up!
