Saturday Hank and I got on the water around 9am. Lake Sonoma came up about 10 feet since last time I was out here a couple weeks ago, and it was already at full pool then. There are submerged oak trees that are usually never it the water. All the storms we've had lately really muddied up the arms, but the main body still had around 3 foot visibility. Hank caught a three pounder first thing on a 3/8 oz jig with a smallie beaver. It came out of 20 feet of water on a rock pile near the marina. We went back into the warm springs arm and fished the running water from the creeks entering the lake. I caught a couple 2lbrs flipping a 5in white tube. Then Hank caught one around 4.5lbs one the jig. Some of the creeks had warmer (55 deg.), and clearer water coming in. Those were the ones that were holding the fish. We went back to the rock piles around the narrows and I caught a 2.5lb smallie on a 3in Dry Creek Tube. At this point in was about 3pm and we decided to make the run up north to see if our creek pattern would work there. After hitting about 20 creeks, we finally found one that looked good. I flipped the white tube all the way in the back and stuck one close to 9lbs, my largest out of Sonoma. By the end of the day we had around 22lbs for our largest 5 bass. Because of our success we decided to fish the Marine Unlimited Tournament on Sunday. It was cold and drizzly all day. We started off on a rock pile and caught a 1.5lb on a jig. We spent the next couple hours fishing rock piles, but only caught a couple short fish. We moved to the creek pattern, but I could tell that the air temp was too cold. The water coming in was the same temperature as the lake. We hit just about every damn creek in the lake, and finally at 1pm a caught a 5lbr on a Texas rigged Brush Hog. It was in the creek next to where I caught the 9lbr the day before. We continued to bounce around the lake fishing creeks, but had no luck. With about 5 minutes left, we were fishing right by the ramp, and caught a 2.5 lb smallie on a jig. 3 bass totaling 9.2 lbs was the total weight. I was quite disappointed with the results, but to my surprise, we still ended up finishing 6th place out of 38 boats. Almost half the boats blanked and only a few caught 5 fish limits. Sunday was definitely a tough day, but with this warm weather we are getting this week, things should really start turning on!
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