I will be there riding as a judge. It should be interesting. I haven't ever been on the lake before. The closest I have gotten is eating at the Oasis.

There's some monsters in the lake. Here's one I caught yesterday... looking forward to the tournament.

The biggest problem with this tournament when it was held in DFW is the timing! It was at the same time as no less than 6 other major festivals! As to the turnout for Texoma, the lake was too high, and virtually "shut down". Casino up 75 wasn't a venue to draw from the majority of the bassers in the metromess.

^^^^
Debra

I attended the Saturday Expo at the Texoma Tournament.
Really sad how low the turnout was.
On the other hand you got full attention at every booth and buy all the Pros you wanted to talk to.
There was some decent seminars put on by the Pros also.
I will make the trip from DFW to Austin, take my Shimanos to be cleaned for free and look at all the new electronics with factory reps there to answer my questions.

There are several reasons that Rayburn attendance was low some of them are mentioned here, but also Rayburn doesn't have a location on the water to put on the full expo it is mostly surrounded by national forest and because it is a Corps or engineers lake the marinas are small and it is very rural. For example the Expo was at the EXPO center in Lufkin 40 to 45 miles from the take off and demo rides at Cassel Boykin Park. My son and I were in the Nitro Booth and the people who came through the booth and were interested in a boat and demo ride were told ok just drive out to Cassel Boykin and they will give you a demo ride there. I would think you would have to be pretty serious to drive 45 minutes for a boat ride. I saw the same issue at the Classic this year in Houston. I know its bigger and needs a large venue but to go from looking at boats in downtown Houston to lake Conroe for a ride??? the traffic in and out of Houston was an issue too. I heard that the Grand lake classic was 90 miles from the expo don't see how you make that work.