Having observed that yesterday’s afternoon trip brought very slow fishing in the first two hours, I did what I could to lend some variety to the trip as we waited for nature to turn on.  I did check one particularly productive area out with live shad, but the fish would have nothing to do with it, so, we headed to try some downrigging over top of some smaller fish I’d spotted on sonar the day before as I was waiting for my afternoon clients to arrive.  We ran downriggers and Storm ThinFins down between 10-15 feet right through schools of suspended fish showing on sonar.  These fish turned out to be smallish white bass.  We boated 5 white bass and 1 crappie in about an hour’s worth of effort, then headed back out to the hybrid grounds to see if they’d turned on yet.

As it turned out, the fish turned back on within 12 minutes of when they had done so the day before, which was around 6:15pm.  This gave us about 2 hours of daylight left to make hay while the sun shone.

We found fish at 3 areas, although the intensity of the bite did not come close to what I’ve observed in the mornings at any of them.

By dark, we worked up 33 fish including one crappie, white bass, hybrid stripers, and blue catfish.  The best action of the trip came in a 20 minutes window from 7:25 to 7:45.  This was right before the setting sun set below a thick bank of clouds in the west, essentially causing a sunset-like lowering of the ambient light levels.