Father & Son Fishing — Can’t Beat It!! — 49 Fish, Stillhouse Fishing Guide Report, 11 Aug. 2012






This morning I fished with Jimmy and Josh B. This is the first time I’d had them out on the boat, but I suspect it won’t be the last! They really enjoyed the variety versus the bank fishing they normally do.


Josh (L) and Jimmy (R) with our four best white bass of the trip today.


Jimmy and Josh work together daily as a father and son team offering services such as lawn maintenance, tree trimming, and the like, so it was only natural that they would decide to fish together, too.

We had a light N. wind today which is uncommon for summertime in Texas, and I wasn’t sure if that was going to impact the fishing or not. We never saw a stitch of topwater action, but, the suspended fish bite was solid.



As Jimmy met me at the boat, he commented how clean the park and the shoreline were. He’s been accustomed to fishing at the Cedar Gap area on the upper end of the lake where floods have deposited tons of timber and where the groundskeeping efforts seem to be less thorough. He was excited just to be in such an ideal outdoor environment.

As we got underway I explained how summertime fishing typically involves the pursuit of suspended fish holding just above the thermocline and how we would go about consistently presenting our lures to fish in that horizontal band of water, primarily by using downriggers. They both grasped the concept of what we were doing and why we were doing it, so, off we went to put theory into practice.

These fellows are used to working with their hands, so, they caught on pretty quickly concerning how to rig up the downriggers and get them properly set. Once we eliminated some unproductive water over the first 15-20 minutes, we hit paydirt and stayed in the fish for the remainder of our trip, rarely going more than a few minutes without boating fish.

We began our day over a stretch of water near Area 041/658. We found loosely schooled white bass within 3-4 feet of the bottom over a 27-32 foot bottom and used tandem rigs equipped with modified Pet Spoons to do the dirty work. We boated 19 fish in the first 90 minutes of effort before this area played out.

We then moved on to Area 1117. This area was a bit shallower at 24-26 feet deep, and we found fish holding a bit closer to the bottom here and also schooled together a bit more densely. For this reason, I chose to try using slab spoons (TNT180’s in 3/4 oz.) in a chrome/white color to tempt these fish. We boated 6 fish in short order, then moved a few yards very slowly while closely watching sonar then hovered over the fish we’d found and picked up 4 more fish here, again, using the slabs both vertically and horizontally.

After these fish lost interest and slowed down, we returned to downrigging and stuck with it until right around 11:20. Over this period of time we worked over Area 1122/1123 and put a final mess of 20 fish in the boat, including an unheard of 5 sets of doubles (two fish caught on one rod at the same time), including a “multi-species double” boated by Josh, consisting of a white bass and a largemouth bass hitting the tandem rig at the same time.

Over the course of the entire trip, the boys boated at least 10 sets of doubles. As we move into the hottest part of the summer and the size of the schools of fish tends to increase (that is, the number of fish in a school) the likelihood of such multiple hookups increases, as well.

We ended the day with a total of 49 fish, including 45 white bass, 2 largemouth bass, and 2 freshwater drum. The best part of the trip to me was the consistency of the bite. We caught fish nearly at the same rate from start to finish and kept it engaging the whole trip.


TALLY = 49 FISH, all caught and released

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TODAY’S CONDITIONS:

Start Time: 6:45a

End Time: 11:25a

Air Temp: 77F at trip’s start.

Water Surface Temp: 86.4F

Wind: N5-7.

Skies: Skies were fair and cloudless.