Stockton Lake Experience

Stockton lake was a tough BFL for me. Ended up having a decent boater but the fish didn't cooperate as much for us. I was able to catch a couple of keepers to get some points on a J-Town Tackle 1/4 oz Shakyhead worm fishing the old bank line. What sucked was I caught a fish that was just shy of 15 inches up in the bushes on the shakeyhead as well. The predominant pattern was flipping bushes and most of the time I feel like on a smaller lake like Stockton that you could be fishing behind people all day as the tournament progresses. My boater had a flipping bite going but we didn't have much for the first couple of hours. He was able to make a couple of good adjustments to get one of the top 20 checks. I learned a couple of things from him about the lake so that was a plus. I had never fished Stockton lake before but if I had it to do over again I think I might have concentrated on fishing the old bank line all day. I tried to flip behind my boater for probably a combined couple of hours which wasn't very productive. It seemed like if there was a fish on a bush he did a pretty good job of catching the ones that were there. I ended up weighing in one largemouth and one smallmouth. I finished somewhere in the 50's in the tournament but ended up moving up in points to 30 overall. I'm looking at fishing the BFL on Lake of the Ozarks in a couple of weeks. It should be one hell of a tournament because the fish on Lake of the Ozarks will be done spawning for the most part and there will be plenty of fry guarders and fish moving out on the points. It should be awesome but guess we will have to see how the weather is the week leading into the tournament.