This morning I fished with Colton Price and two of his buddies, Lee Hosie and Jack Wronski, in celebration of Colton’s 18th birthday.

 

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From left: Jack Wronski, Colton Price, and Lee Hosie with a few of the better white bass we caught today on slabs.

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This trip was in celebration of Colton Price’s 18th birthday.

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Jack Wronski with one of the 127 fish we boated today.

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Lee Hosie, who once fished for mackerel off the coast of Scotland, added his fair share to our tally today.

Colton lives at Stillhouse Hollow Lake and is in his junior year at Salado High School.  His friends both drove in last night from Katy, TX, where Colton used to live.  Lee is a senior about to graduate from Katy High School, and is on his way to LeTourneau University to study mechanical engineering, and Jack is a junior at Faith West, a private Christian school near Katy.  Baseball is the glue that bonded all three of these fellows together.

As I awoke this morning I saw flashes of lightning to the SE and heard the low rumble of distant thunder.  I checked out the weather radar and saw two small, fast moving storm cells right along I-35 — one near Jarrell and the other down by San Marcos.  The first one passed on by before we launched, and the other forced a 15 minute off-the-water break at mid-morning, but otherwise we lucked out and had very manageable conditions.

Today was the first time our winds have had a southerly component in quite some time and the fish responded well despite the turbulent atmosphere.  We caught fish over the entire course of our 4+ hours on the water, with the best fishing coming just after the second storm cell passed, when skies were brightest (although still quite grey) and the wind peaked at ~11mph for a short time.

Every last fish we caught today came on a 3/4 oz. Redneck Fish’n’ Jigs Model 180 slab in white color fished using a “smoking” technique.  During the first half of the trip the fish were active enough to migrate towards the commotion caused by other fish being caught, thus minimizing the amount of moving we had to do to stay in the fish.  Towards the end of the trip, as the fish got more and more lethargic, we would typically catch a few fish as soon as we dropped our slabs upon arrival at a new location, but then would have to move a few boatlengths to continue to get bit, as the fish were unwilling to travel very far despite the commotion caused by schoolmates being caught.

The boys were all very competitive and insisted on keeping individual fish counts to see who was in the “Lee-d”, and, as you might imagine, the banter level remained quite high the entire trip.

By 11am, although fish were still able to be observed on sonar, they had done all they were going to do for this morning, and we called it a good day right there.