Day 1 Clear Lake Midday Update

Slow start to Western Division finale leaves plenty of room for improvement

The western powerhouse known as Clear Lake seems to be running on low voltage, at least in terms of early productivity for day one of the final Costa FLW Series Western Division event presented by Evinrude. You can always tell how thing are going by the amount of time anglers spend running vs. fishing and this morning saw a lot of wakes.

With much of the lake’s grass killed by municipal herbicide treatments, the lack of filtration has allowed much of the lake to take on a dingy brown to greenish tint. Since algae tends to suspend or float, it makes sense that many anglers reported doing well with short-leader drop-shots for fish pinned to the bottom.

The strategy’s working beautifully for co-angler Keith Bridges, who had a limit by 10 a.m. — including an 8-pounder caught on the first cast to a new spot. Bridges’ pro partner Jason Christy was also using a flick shake rig, but told us the drop-shot was the deal.

“You just have to hit them on the head with it,” Christy says of the fish’s disinterest in chasing anything. “You have to cover water and drop right on top of them. The dock pilings have been more productive than the tules because those pilings absorb the sun’s heat and transmit that heat into the water.”

Evidence: Bridges caught his big kicker by casting his drop-shot paired with a Roboworm to a metal piling.

At takeoff, a good chunk of the field headed south to the Rattlesnake arm, but most had displaced by mid-morning. A handful worked the Redbud arm, but no one was setting it on fire. We didn’t make it to the top of the lake, but we suspect several boats fished the Rodman Slough area.

Nearly flat conditions limited the reaction bite, although we did see Roy Hawk throwing a crankbait around the edges of a rocky area. He had fished the interior with a drop-shot and wanted to sweep the area before departing.

Divisional points leader Joe Uribe Jr., started on a rock-strewn flat inside a large rock reef system, but the early finesse bites he’d found in practice were not happening. He also tried docks, but was fishless by about 9:30.

Notably, we saw several co-anglers catching fish in these tough conditions. Uribe’s partner, Hayden Evans, had plucked a couple of keepers off docks in the first hour, while Deanna Moreno improved her limit with a cull right in front of the camera boat.

One thing’s for certain, there’s plenty of baitfish in Clear Lake, as indicated by vast numbers of those professional shad assassins known as grebes. Running the lake’s Redbud and Rattlesnake arms was like navigating a minefield of them.

So, there’s plenty of food for hungry bass. We’ll be interested to see how many get a little pep in their step with the afternoon’s warming.

Tune in to weigh-in at 3 p.m. PT to watch how it unfolds.