This evening I fished with Steve N. of Temple (a.k.a. “Baboo”) and his nearly 7 year old grandson, Caleb (the one who calls Steve Baboo).
Steve and Caleb display the best of 45 fish we hunted down from deep to shallow today using a variety of tactics.
Steve, a Temple CPA, and Caleb have been out with me on a number of occasions. It is neat to see how, over the years, Caleb has matured. On our first trip a few years back his attention span, as I recall, could be measured in minutes, but, today he stayed on task the whole time independently landing a number of fish with no assistance whatsoever. His manners, too, were more polished with “Yes, sir.” and “Thank you.” a very regular part of his vocabulary. To his credit, Steve brought lots of snacks just in case of temporary attention deficits!!
As we got going today, we began our afternoon trip right where we’d concluded the morning’s trip, at Area 1034/1058. Again, we found fish here but they were very sluggish. They responded only to our first attempt at vertical jigging, then turned off not to become interested again. We boated just 4 fish here and had to move on.
We dropped down into deeper waters this time and pulled 21 fish off of area 1043 in ~38 feet of water. These all came on TNT 180 slabs in silver, white, and a silver/white combination — all worked equally well. I really had to search hard for these fish and there wasn’t as many in this general area as there has been all this winter. I believe this area is playing out given the rising water level, water temperature, and increasing day length.
As I have all week, I moved us shallower as sunset approached so as to be fishing in yet still well-lit water as dark approached. We were fortunate to drive right up on a large school of fish holding near bottom in 20-22 feet of water at Area 103. We set up over top of these fish, I changed out our 3/4 oz. slabs to 3/8 oz. slabs, and we vertically jigged very successfully for the final hour to add exactly 20 more white bass to our count for the trip. As dark neared, Steve and I both clearly noted that the fish fed less effectively and less accurately. It was not uncommon to have a fish strike and miss 3 or 4 times before actually connecting with the slab. I suspect this is because the begin to change from primarily sight feeding to using their lateral line to detect the bait’s position.
TALLY = 45 fish, all caught and released.
TODAY’S CONDITIONS:
Start Time: 3:45p
End Time: 8:05p
Air Temp: 76F at trip’s start.
Water Surface Temp: 63.4F
Wind: Winds were S10-12.
Skies: Skies were partly sunny to mostly cloudy.