Fishing on First Base?!? 52 Fish, Stillhouse Hollow, 23 April 2011






This morning I welcomed best friends Janviere (nickname “J” ) and Alissa aboard in celebration of J’s 10th birthday coming up on April 28th! J’s mom, Suzanne, and her step-dad, John, chaperoned.

Cute girls, cute fish!! Janviere (L) and Alissa (R) went fishing for J’s 10th Birthday!!

“J”, ably assisted by John, got the hang of jigging early and kept her technique consistent — and it paid off!!


Alissa, who showed no fear at gripping fish, handling hooks, baiting up with maggots, or anything else, got to be J’s special birthday guest today.


In order to keep this whole thing under wraps until their actual arrival at the boat ramp, the “story” was that Salado had a new professional baseball team (the Salado Hitters, I believe) and that the family was going to watch them play the Rangers in Salado. Crowds were sure to form early, so an early wakeup and drive to the destination was necessary.

So, both J and Alissa were a bit taken aback when they learned they were actually going on a fishing trip this morning.

As we got started, we tried some flatline trolling in the vicinity of Area 999, but zeroed there. We did finally contact bait and fish in the vicinity of Area 116 and made multiple passes resulting in boating our first couple of fish of the morning — 2 white bass and 1 short largemouth.

Once the skies brightened a bit through the clouds and the wind began to push adequately, we moved out to open water and searched for congregations of fish. We were successful in locating some reluctant, bottom-hugging white bass at Area 766 in about 22-24 feet of water. These fish were just beginning to turn on and never really got frenzied to the point of responding to a smoking retrieve. Instead, we had to jig for these fish, so, I set the girls up with braided line to make bite detection simple and they did the rest. In about 1 hour and 45 minutes spent here, we boated 43 fish including 41 white bass, 1 sunfish, and 1 short largemouth bass.

By 10:45 the action here was beginning to wane and the girls both had hurting wrists and fingers. I explained that our options for the remainder of our trip were to continue jigging for white bass elsewhere or to give sunfishing a try. The variety of sunfishing appealed to both girls, so, we broke out the panfish gear, headed shallow, and, long story short, boated 6 sunfish (2 longears and 4 greens) in about 30 minutes’ time at Area 456.

With the sunfish thinning out, the wind now at 20mph, and the clock telling us it was beyond 11:30, we decided to call it a great day right there and headed for shore.

TALLY = 52 FISH, all caught and released


TODAY’S CONDITIONS:

Start Time: 7:30a

End Time: 11:40a

Air Temp: 73F at trip’s start.

Water Surface Temp: ~71.8F

Wind: Winds were S11-12 at trip’s start, steadily increasing to S20 by trip’s end.

Skies: Skies were completely overcast at trip’s start, steadily decreasing to 50% cloudy on a fair sky by trip’s end.








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