20 | November | 2016 | Fishing Report

This past Saturday evening, November 19th, I fished with Brian Olds, his wife, Tasha, and their two kids, eight-year-old Katelyn, and four-year-old Connor. I planned an afternoon of white bass fishing with frequent transitions in tactics and locations so as to keep the kids engaged.

Katelyn Olds, age 8, with the last and largest fish of the 28 she and her family landed tonight using a combination of jigging and downrigging.

From left: Katelyn, Brian, Tasha, and Connor Olds with a sampling of the white bass we landed this evening. The Olds family also landed, hybrid striped bass, drum, sunfish, and a channel catfish.
This trip was a tall order to fill. I not only had younger children to be concerned with, but also fairly tough, post-frontal conditions in the wake of yesterday’s cold front passage which was by far the most severe of the season. Overnight clearing left this morning’s low at 39 Fahrenheit.

We began our trip at 1:30p, and by this time the north wind had subsided to about 12 mph, and the sharp bite had dropped out of the wind. As we launched, the air temperature was 58° and fell slowly through 51°.

We began the trip by searching bottom features between 25 and 40 feet deep and probing them with twin downriggers equipped with tandem rigged Pet Spoons. At the first area we fished, as we were downrigging, we encountered large schools of fish which I felt would give us a chance at successfully vertically jigging. As it turned out, although we gave vertical jigging a try on a number of occasions, the fish never really responded enthusiastically to that approach.

We tried vertical jigging in two other areas, both with timber on the bottom, so downrigging was not possible. We picked up fish at both areas, but they never really turned on strongly at either location.

At our last stop, we were able to use the downriggers once again, and given that Katelyn and Brian were my only active anglers at this point, as Tasha tended to Connor who had just about worn out on us, we just stuck with the downrigging as the fish moved consistently shallower as it got darker. We put a final seven fish in the boat at this last stop, and thanks to Katelyn’s willingness to stick it out for “just one more pass”, she was rewarded with our largest fish of the day, a 19 inch, 3 pound hybrid striped bass which fell for the downrigged Pet Spoon in just 14 feet of water.

As we wrapped up right at sunset at around 5:30, we had put a grand total of 28 fish in the boat and had managed to keep the kids engaged for the entirety of the trip using a variety of fishing techniques, sharing lots of snacks, allowing the kids to fool with the fish we kept in the livewell just for that purpose, and allowing them to experiment with the pair of binoculars that Tasha had wisely brought along for each one.

As we put a rope on the courtesy dock, from beneath his shirt, sweatshirt, jacket, hat, and blanket, young Connor said, “This was a blast.”

TALLY = 28 fish, all caught and released

TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:

Start Time: 1:30p

End Time: 5:30p

Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 58F

Water Surface Temp: 70.2F

Wind Speed & Direction: NNW12

Sky Conditions: Clear and cloudless

Water Level: ~0.09 feet high and slowly falling at ~0.01 feet per day

GT = 60

AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS: