I was joined again today by Chris and 11 year old Cooper K. on their 2nd annual Fathers’ Day outing together with me. Chris operates the Georgetown “Catfish Parlour” which is closed on Mondays, so it gave him a great opportunity to enjoy a bit of summer vacation with his son while avoiding the noise and traffic of the weekend lake scene.
Father and son with our best 4 white bass of the day, all taken around 24 feet on Pet Spoons.
Cooper set out lures, lowered the ‘rigger balls, adjusted depth, and more all to get our presentations just right. Then came the payoff!
Start Time: 6:15a
End Time: 12:15p
Air Temp: 77F at trip’s start, heading towards the high-90’s.
Water Surface Temp: ~84.1F
Wind: Winds were SSE4 at sunrise, slowly swinging and tapering up to SSW12 by trip’s end.
Skies: Skies were clear and bright.
Before launching out, as we got familiar with all the gear at dockside, Cooper used a slipfloat to target a few sunfish he spotted in the water, and wound up catching 5 sunfish and a black-tailed shiner in no time flat.
Once we pushed off, things really started slowly for us today when, despite pretty decent conditions for topwater action, we saw only 2 decent schools of bass appear topside around Area 061, and then only for a few seconds. Following that, the winds went slack for a good while which always makes things tough. We checked 4 different areas looking for fish and bait until we came across the right combination on sonar between Areas 444 and 644 . Even so, with the wind near calm, we passed over a lot of inactive fish to comb out a few takers. In this area, we saw spare, small schools of white with a predominance of solo drum hanging out at mid-depths. They responded well once the winds came up a bit and remained blowing in a sustained fashion. For our efforts here we boated 1 white bass and 7 drum bringing our tally up to 14 fish.
We considered some livebait fishing, but I didn’t find any significant largemouth presence on some reliable breaklines, so we pressed on.
We headed to Area 646 and found some scattered whites, but no bait.
We again moved, this time to between Areas 056 and 649. As we motored in here things started looking really good with ample bait showing in a threatened posture, and schooled white bass mixed right in with the bait. For the next 2 hours we worked these fish over at between 22 and 25 feet over a 25 to 32 foot bottom. The fish stayed willing to bite this entire time, allowing us to boat 23 white bass, a drum, and the day’s only largemouth bass, all in this general vicinity. Twice we had father-son doubles on, and, to end the trip, Cooper successfully landed a tandem (two fish on one rod) on the Pet/Licker combo.
As we eased back next to the courtesy dock, Cooper asked if he could harass the sunfish a little bit more. I obliged as I got the truck backed down and the boat cleaned up. He wound up landing two more lively black-tails in no time flat. At that point we called it a day and agreed that “better a slow start and a strong finish than vice versa”.
TALLY = 41 FISH