I had the kind of trip I like best this morning — a father and young son heading out together simply for the sake of spending time with one another. When you converse with folks for 5 hours in a fairly confined space, you get to know a bit about them. I discovered that Brian and Trevor (and his mom!) all perform in Shakespearean productions in the Austin area and have a big “Henry the Fifth” production coming up this summer!

Schoolie largemouth like this one and plenty of white bass made for an action-packed morning once the wind started pushing from the south.

I met Brian and Trevor M. of Cedar Park, TX, at 6:45am and over the next 5 hours we experienced a very typical summer fishing pattern. The action followed a bell-shaped curve, starting off slowly, building in intensity along with the wind, then, around 10:45 beginning to weaken, then coming to a halt within an hour’s time after that.

We began searching the depths with sonar and found precious little at the first five areas we graphed. Finally, between Areas 458 and 823, the ice began to break a bit and, at 21 feet down over a 35+ foot bottom, we saw gamefish moving in and around bait schools. We ran Pets on ‘riggers just above these fish and managed 2 largemouth and 1 white bass here. Subsequent passes showed little else, so, we moved on.

We headed to Area 453 (the first time I’ve checked this area so far this season) and graphed a lot of bait in the upper third of the water column. Soon, the gamefish feeding on them began to show, as well. We established a “circuit” from Area 822 through Area 453 through Area 820 and through Area 821 that produced for us on nearly every single pass for about 2 hours’ time. These fish were unusually high in the water column, holding at 11-15 feet down, with schools occasionnally seen at 20-22 feet as well. At one point in time the fish showed so densely on sonar that I stopped the boat and we attempted to throw bladebaits at these fish, but, the fish were oriented on very, very small shad fry and even our small cast offerings were ignored. As soon as we went back to downrigging, we again began boating fish from right out of the school we’d just cast to. In all, we boated 32 fish at this area including 1 drum and a roughly 1:3 mix of schoolie-sized largemouth to white bass. Most of the white bass went right at ~11 inches with some smaller and few larger. The largemouth went 0.75 to 1.25 pounds.

Around 11am I offered to either stick with what was working or “roll the dice” and leave fish to find fish in hopes of pinning down some congregated fish on deep structures that could be vertically jigged. We looked over a number of areas without success which did not surprise me given the time and the fact that the wind velocity had already peaked and was tapering off a bit. We did not find the fish we thought we might and so wrapped up our trip with our count standing at 35.

Trevor noted an interesting trend developing early in our trip. It seems that anytime one of the three of us decided to have a snack, the fish would bite. So Brian (with the slower metabolism of the pair) encouraged Trevor to snack regularly to test his theory out. Never one to do without a granola bar now and again, I also felt obligated as the guide to see if this thing could indeed be true. We really never reached a conclusion … nor did we leave the lake hungry, so, all was well!

TALLY = 35 FISH, all caught and released

TODAY’S CONDITIONS:

Start Time: 6:45a

End Time: 12:15p

Air Temp: 75F at trip’s start.

Water Surface Temp: ~82.8F

Wind: Winds were light from the SSE at around 5 at sunrise, increasing to SSE11, then tapering back to SSE8-9 by 10:45.

Skies: Skies were fair.