This past Tuesday morning, 29 March, I fished with retired U.S. Navy Captain Ray Johnson or Harker Heights. Ray served our country as a physician and flight surgeon, and I’ve had the good fortune of fishing with him a number of times over the past several years.
This morning’s trip with retired U.S. Navy Captain Ray Johnson yielded a mixed bag including largemouth, crappie, drum, and (mostly) white bass.
Ray is now in his late 70’s, so I looked for a weather forecast that wouldn’t have us rocking and rolling in the wind and wherein the temperatures would be bearable. Last week around Thursday, I saw this morning’s forecast and bounced it off of Ray. He was ready to go!
As we got going a bit before 7:30a, the skies were overcast to the point of light drizzle, and the winds were calm. I thought we might see some topwater action, but only single fish could be seen here and there — no definitive schooling or aggressive, sustained topwater was noted.
We kind of picked at the fish for the first 90 minutes or so, only putting 11 fish in the boat by 9am. I left the more murky, shallow water we started the morning in for deeper, clearer water, and, in 63 feet of water, we found our first good concentration of fish. We vertically jigged with 3/4 oz. white slabs for right at 75 minutes, enjoying consistent success, although the intensity level of this feed was pretty low. We observed a lot more fish chasing our lures on sonar than were willing to commit to actually overtaking them and biting as we watched things play out beneath us on sonar. Eventually this bite died to nothing, requiring a move.
We moved to a similar, but shallower area, in 36-38 feet of water and found a more aggressive school of white bass eager to bite. These fish were, on average, a bit larger than we’d found in deeper water. By now the time was around 10:50a, and I suspected the bite wouldn’t go much longer given that the wind, which had peaked around 10mph, was beginning to slow a bit. Indeed, these fish stayed fired up for only a short 10-12 minutes and then sulked with little response to our jigging after that, despite being readily identified on sonar directly beneath us.
We looked over 2 more areas with sonar, dropping slabs at one of them, but, the bit was over and so we called it quits around 11:50a with a total of 44 fish boated, including 1 crappie, 3 largemouth, 2 drum, and 39 white bass.
TALLY = 44 FISH, all caught and released
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TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:
Start Time: 7:25a
End Time: 11:50a
Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 58F
Water Surface Temp: 65.5F
Wind Speed & Direction: Calm at start, picking up to SSE7-9
Sky Conditions: 100% grey cloud cover.
Water Level: 623.73 and falling with 622.0 being full pool. Water being released at 1135 cubic feet per second. Lake fell 0.15 feet in the past 24 hours
Other: GT= 0
Wx SNAPSHOT (a graphical look at the forecast that faced us today):
AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:
**Area 116 shallow blade bait bite at (obscured) sunrise — 4 white bass
**Area 764 shallow blade bait bite in low light – 2 white bass
**Area 1724 shallow Rippin Rap bite in low light – 1 white bass, 1 largemouth bass, 1 crappie
**Area vic 947 deep vertical jigging for mixed 1-2 year class white bass
**Area vic 803 deep vertical jigging for mixed mainly 2 year class white bass
Bob Maindelle
Owner, Holding the Line Guide Service
254.368.7411 (call or text)
Website: www.HoldingTheLineGuideService.com
E-mail: Bob@HoldingTheLineGuideService.com
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