Reservation Number : 29464
Property Name : Nix Ranch: Lake TCU
Reservation Date : 08/21/2021 All Day -
Total Fish/Sizes : 71 bass, 4 bluegill
Lures Used : Spook/Fluke/Swimbait/PopR

Got to take an old friend out to fish all day at Lake TCU.  We had a most awesome day and caught a good mess of fish.  My buddy works at a treatment facility and has had a rough go of it lately and really needed to get out and do some fishing so I obliged. Nothing like fishing to cure what ails you.   As Dub said when we spoke to him, “you boys are fishing hard”, and we got to catch up while doing so.  Great trip. Fished from 6:30-11, took an hour and half break, 12:30-3:40, then from 5-8:30. 

1. Didn’t have electronics and left my scale at Tear Drop (which Mr. McCallum was able to retrieve while there the following day) – but the water was coolish – I’m guessing 80 or so.  Clarity was good with a good green stain, 3-4 foot visibility. Cloudy early and sunny after 1pm. We even got a touch of rain. Wind moderate out of thr S/SE.
2. Milfoil is way down since I was last there a few months ago.  I believe I saw two large carp munching and I’m guessing the tilapia helped – made fishing easier this time around and opened up the playbook a bit. 
3. Mostly banked fish for the first hour or so as the fish were close to the bank, consistent with my prior trip and other reports, used a PopR. Caught some large bluegill on them too. 
4. Got in the boat and fished the islands and if you look on the picture from 2014 when it was dry, we worked the edges of the shallow spots adjacent to deeper water, basically rotating from one to the next and each island using a combination of a spook/fluke/swimbait.  Gotr very few on the dam and the old dock. 
5. We got on some small fish early with smaller flukes and then upsized to magnums which produced bigger fish and no dinks after our initial culling spree just fishing them weigfhtless and twitching them like jerkbaits. 
6. Midday they were biting swimbaits well and stuck with that pattern – fishing was slower but consistent – just rolled them above the shallow grass and let it sink when it hit the deeper areas.  
7. Didn’t get any monsters but almost all of our fish after upsizing were the better 2-4lb class.  We probably hurt our catch rate by doing so, but the little ones were all over the smaller flukes before the bigger fish could get to them.  
8. The fiishing fell off pretty hard the last 1.5 hours (and almost no breaks in the water from surfacing fish), but they did stage shallow again the last 30 min and we picked up some more off the bank on the PopR.  
9. Got to meet Dub and had a nice talk – he has an interesting story.  I grew up not too far from where he lived for a long while (Wylie/Sachse).  Guess they are gonna pave the tollroad pretty close to the property at some point from what he says.  Won’t happen for a while but disappointing to hear.  I meant to ask him what strain bass he put in here – while they aren’t giants, they are consistently aggressive, even in the heat of August.  
10. If there was one property I had to fish with a guest and put them on fish, this would always be it.  Unassuming smaller lake that just flat out produces.