This morning I fished with Jason W. of Round Rock, Texas. Jason owns his own boat and fishes successfully quite often on both Lake Georgetown and Lake Buchanan, primarily with livebait. His desire today was to understand “electronic sight fishing” and be able to replicate what he learned.
Downrigging
and vertical jigging provided mixed bag results today. Jason shows a
nice Belton Lake crappie that fell for his tandem rig. We also caught
largemouth, white bass, and hybrid stripers.
No, they are not giants, but they opened a whole new world of fishing to Jason today as he first saw these fish on sonar, made a presentation to them, and successfully hooked and landed them — that is electronic sight fishing!!
Jason initially contacted me about 2 weeks ago after perusing my website and seeing that I use a sonar-intensive approach to my angling. As I considered today’s weather forecast on Sunday, we were to have balmy conditions and southerly winds on the tail end of a nice warming trend, and in advance of another cold snap, What we got come “game day” today was a cold, damp fog with a NNW blow and very tough conditions.
The silver lining on this cloud was that those tough conditions made electronics all that much more necessary as fish were scattered and no birds were working, so, the only way to locate fish was to detect them with sonar.
We used downriggers for part of our time on the water and then switched over to vertical jigging and a modified jigging technique I refer to as “sniping”.
Each of the three tactics produced fish for Jason. It’s one of those things you have to experience personally to understand — when you give something new a try, put effort and concentration into it and it finally “works”. That happened for Jason today — TWICE!! First, we were sniping for suspended fish and I’d shown him what to look for on sonar and how to react to fish that appeared. After working his bait for a while in 32′ of water, a “blip” showed up on sonar at about 13 feet. Jason adjusted his presentation as we’d practiced, held steady, felt the strike, set the hook, and all of a sudden was successful in using a technique that was totally new to him which opens up a whole spectrum of possibilities for his own fishing efforts.
Not long after, a similar scenario played out as we jigged vertically near bottom for schooled white bass.
This trip did not produce the biggest fish or the most fish Jason has ever boated, but the lessons learned were invaluable.
TALLY = 15 FISH, all caught and released
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TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:
Start Time: 8:15a
End Time: 2:00p
Air Temp: 56F at trip’s start.
Water Surface Temp: 53-54F
Wind: NNW13 tapering to NNW9
Skies: Foggy to the point of forcing a delayed start, then
Other Notes: GT30
Areas Fished with success:
** 1335 – downrigging
** 1341/1340 – downrigging
** 1290/1012 vertical jigging
** 1342/1343 sniping
Bob Maindelle
Holding the Line Guide Service
254-368-7411
www.HoldingTheLineGuideService.com
Salado, Texas