This morning I fished with Mr. Gabe Carreras and his 7-year-old son, Christian, of Round Rock, TX, and Gabe’s father-in-law, Chris, from Birmingham, AL.
From left: Chris, Gabe, and Christian, all with hybrid ranging from 18-20″ taken both on top and with slabs worked through actively feeding fish found throughout the water column in ~30-35 feet of water..
With the weather holding very steady since our last cold front 2 Thursdays ago, and the moon now waning toward new moon once again, the good fishing has gotten even better.
We started the day on fish feeding on topwater chasing larger bait today, thus making them a bit easier to fool. We found a mix of white bass and hybrid stripers joining the fray and took them on both cork rigs and slabs. Of course the slabs had to be retrieved quickly to keep them up high in the water column were the fish were.
Once the topwater action began to subside, we used downriggers to encounter fish, then stopped over top of the fish we’d found to fish for them more thoroughly. Since it was still early and the sun not yet too intense, we found these fish spread through the water column (versus down near bottom as happens later in the morning) and were able to use larger 3/4 oz. slabs to fool additional white bass and hybrid stripers. We’d boated 28 fish up to this point
As the sun climbed higher and the winds subsided, the white bass and hybrid action died. To keep young Christian engaged, we headed up shallow and I demonstrated the use of a bream pole for targeting sunfish and other, smaller, shallow-water species. We hit two areas for a few minutes each and added 13 fish to our tally, including bluegill sunfish, longear sunfish, blacktail shiners, and a juvenile largemouth bass.
We closed out the trip today once again using the downriggers to locate fish, then slabs to exploit what we’d found. As we searched with the ‘riggers, Christian managed to pull in a “triple”, catching 3 white bass on the 3 baits of his umbrella rig all at the same time. We also landed a few doubles in this manner before finding a school of white bass sizeable enough to stop and use slabs over. We wound up finding two distinct schools of white bass, mixed with short hybrid, and landed a total of 39 fish from these two schools before calling it a day with exactly 80 fish brought over the gunwales today.
TALLY = 80 FISH, all caught and released
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TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:
Start Time: 6:30a
End Time: 11:00a
Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 73F
Water Surface Temp: 83.2F
Wind Speed & Direction: SSE3-6
Sky Conditions: Thin, grey, low cloud cover to the east before and at sunrise, clearing to 20% clouds on a fair sky.
Note: Lake has dropped 0.03 feet in the last 24 hours and now stands at 593.93 above sea level, with 594.00 being full pool
Other: GT= 30
AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:
**Area 1271/302 topwater at first light
**Area 1129/834 topwater leading to smoking
**Area 1583 & 492 panfish
**Area 1580 & 1589/1081 downrigging to find fish; smoking slabs to catch them
Bob Maindelle
Owner, Holding the Line Guide Service
254.368.7411 (call or text)
Salado, TX
www.HoldingTheLineGuideService.com