Stillhouse Hollow Fishing Report by Stillhouse Hollow Fishing Guide Bob Maindelle

Fished a half day afternoon trip from 3:30p to 8:30p with Jason and Melissa G. of Lewisville as they took a break from work, kids, and scouting for a weekend in Salado by themselves.

Today’s conditions:

Air temp: 82F

Surface temp: 72-73F

Wind: Light and variable from NE to E at 0-4

Weather: High pressure building in following a turbulent morning with a cold front’s passage accompanied by thunderstorms and brief, high wind gust. Skies were high, blue and clear, sun was hot and brilliant.

We started deep first, due to the lack of wind and the bright sun. Came up with 11 fair white bass at Area 129 and then gave a little downrigging a try to create some breeze for Melissa who was getting uncomfortably warm. We wound up with only 3 small fish on Pet Spoons while downrigging, but, this wasn’t really an ideal time/location for that technique. These downrigged fish came within a 100 yard arc to the NE of Area 129 in 25 to 37 feet of water.

We pulled in our lines and headed uplake a little ways to looked at sonar at Area 131. It was completely lit up with white bass both suspending, chasing bait, and tight to bottom. We set up here with the nose into the slight ENE breeze that had developed and put 61 fish in the boat in about 90 minutes. These fish were mostly barely keeper whites, with drum, largemouth, and a crappie thrown in for good measure. We could have kept right on catching fish here, but, since they were smallish, I offered the option of leaving them in pursuit of larger quarry. Jason and Melissa were willing to roll the dice on that, and the gamble paid off.

After looking over several areas and doing some “trial jigging” without success, we finally hit into another big bunch of larger white bass at Area 122, located just to the NW of the waypoint by about 70 feet. These fish literally swam up to meet the descending slabs as they fell. We landed 26 fish here in no time, including primarily 12-14 inch fish, with several shorter fish and 3 15-16 inch largemouth thrown in.

By now it was around 6:50p, and we had planned to search for some twilight topwater downlake, so, with their permission, we left these fish biting to go look for some topwater action. Melissa had never cast with the equipment necessary for this, so we got her trained up and casting well, but never encountered topwater in the vicinity of Area 222, as I thought we might. So, we headed to Area 159 in (slim) hopes that we’d find topwater there. We found none, but did manage one final drum and one final largemouth bass here while fancasting bladebaits waiting for topwater action.

TALLY = 104 FISH, all caught and released except 2 drum that didn’t make it