This past Tuesday morning I fished with Ethen and Alex Wells of Temple, accompanied by their mom, Sabrina.
Alex set the tone for our 114 fish trip with a triple on the very first downrigger set we put down this morning.
Just past the mid-point of our trip, we found some deep white bass in the lower fourth of the water column and got them worked up into a frenzy, allowing for a catch of over 50 fish from an area the size of my boat. Ethen shows one of the 2-year class fish common in this congregation of fish.
Both boys had prior fishing experience and were both capable with spinning gear. Most of their prior efforts had been made casting from the bank. Before we shoved off from the courtesy dock, I went over how to hold and reel a baitcaster – – the kind of reels I use for downrigging, and how to hold and cast a spinning rod in case we ran into fish feeding on top water.
A very light easterly wind continued today with about 30% cloud cover on an otherwise fair sky. These near-calm conditions made for excellent sighting of any fish breaking the surface. Several minutes before the sun rose, I saw individual white bass dimpling the surface in a fairly small patch of water and, after seeing suspended fish down around the 20 foot mark on sonar in the same vicinity, decided we would attempt downrigging to start the day.
As I put the first downrigger down and explain to the boys how to do so in order that they could rig up their own downrigger for the remainder of the trip, we got Alex’s rod down and his rod went off with a triple before we could even get Ethen’s rod in the water. Over the next 25 minutes we landed 22 fish including three sets of triples and a number of doubles and singles. To satisfy the boys’ bent for competition, Sabrina “kept score” of how many fish each boy caught by using her cell phone as a counter. All of these fish came on my summertime favorite – – a three armed umbrella rig equipped with Pet Spoons. These Pet Spoons do a very good job of imitating the young of the year shad so prevalent in the white bass diet right now.
After this area settled down, we moved to deeper water and began seeking out large schools of fish that we could hover over top of and jig for. We made one stop over a fairly sparse school of deep white bass and I hoped we could get them to coalesce beneath us using the thumper and by creating our own commotion by jigging, but, that did not pan out. After going back to downrigging for a bit in order to cover water and catch fish as we did so, we found a nice school of fish in the lower 7 feet of the water column in about 54 feet of water.
Using the Spot Lock function on the Minn Kota Ulterra, we hovered right over top of these fish and they stayed put long enough for us to get our first presentation of slabs down to them. Once the first fish was hooked, the school went on a frenzy. We sat over top of these fish and put 53 in the boat over about an hour’s time.
Eventually these fish played out and we returned to downrigging only to mop up a few more fish in the same general area before it became clear this bite was over. On the now glassy, calm surface, there were no baitfish nor gamefish apparent whatsoever.
Knowing that our most likely option for success from this point forward would be downrigging, and knowing that the boys had already done a good bit of that, I offered that we could pursue sunfish up in the shallows given that was a skill they could immediately apply to make their own bank fishing efforts more successful. The boys seemed genuinely interested in doing this, so, we headed up shallow to cover-filled water to pursue sunfish. Up to this point the boys’ fish totals stayed “neck-and-neck”, but Alex got his mojo on when it came to sunfish…
We used slip float rigs on poles baited with worms and very quickly took our count from 75 fish to a final tally of 114 fish as the boys very handily got the hang of using poles to present our finesse offerings to sunfish of various species.
As we wrapped up our efforts right around 10:15, Sabrina commented that a trip to Academy for sunfish poles was most likely in their very near future!
TALLY: 114 FISH, all caught and released
TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:
Start Time: 6:15a
End Time: 10:15a
Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 77F
Water Surface Temp: 83.1F
Wind Speed & Direction: E0-3
Sky Conditions: Low grey cloud bank in the east obscured sunrise, but once sun cleared that, ~30% cloud cover
Water Level: 0.30 feet high and slowly rising; 0 cfs release at dam
GT = 0
Wx SNAPSHOT:
AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:
**Area 337-252 – downrigging for 22 fish
**Area 1954 – deep white bass on smoked slabs for 53 fish
**Area 189 – shallow sunfish on slipfloats for 39 fish
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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