This past Friday morning I hunted white bass on Stillhouse Hollow with Hiram Dixon and Mashell Retherford, both of Nolanville.
Hiram Dixon and Mashell Retherford with their first fish of the trip this morning. Downrigging definitely outperformed all other presentations.
Once she heard about the possibility of catching a “triple”, Mashell was determined that she was going to catch a triple of her own before we came off the lake.
Mashell, an avid pickleball player, learned of my guide service via Facebook through a mutual friend, Pert Garraway, a fellow pickleball player.
Based on slow starts over the past few morning related to grey cloud cover in the eastern sky, I bumped our start time back a bit to 7:00am.
We still got off to a bit of a slow start, but, I believe that was mainly due to the calm wind conditions we encountered just after sunrise. Once the winds began and then built and sustained at 11-13 mph, the bite ramped up and stayed solid through 11:15am.
We fished 3 areas very thoroughly this morning. The first was a deep breakline, and the last two were cove mouths — all produced a bit more that the one before it as the bite peaked around 10am.
There were few instances this morning when fish were poised such that we could hover atop them and vertically jig for them. I stopped to do this only twice and only the first attempt panned out. The second group of heavily schooled bottom-hugging fish I found ignored slow tailspinner, fast slabs, and even horizontally presented bladebaits — we literally zeroed on these attempts.
Each time I stopped we had been successfully downrigging, and the reason I stopped was because I believed I could catch more fish in less time and with less hassle via jigging than was involved with the downriggers. When this turned out not to be the case we went back to “dance with who brung us” and relied heavily on the downriggers today.
Of the 47 fish we landed today, 1 was a largemouth and 46 were white bass with most being 1- and 2-year class fish. The 3-armed umbrella rig with Pet Spoons trailing was the ticket.
Because the bite went late this morning and Hiram and Mashell were enjoying themselves, I extended our trip an extra 30 minutes to fish the bite to completion. As we wrapped up, Hiram said several times how much the two of them enjoyed the outing; Mashell added that she’d like to come again when the weather cools and the fish begin to “feed up” for the winter (referring back to when I pointed out how productive the window of time between the 2nd week of November and the 3rd week of December typically is).
TALLY: 47 FISH, all caught and released
TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:
Start Time: 7:00am
End Time: 11:30am
Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 78F
Water Surface Temp: 85.9F
Wind Speed & Direction: SW breeze 11-13 mph the entire trip
Sky Conditions: 20% white cloud cover the entire trip
Water Level: 0.26 feet low and slowly falling with only evaporative losses; 0 cfs release at dam
GT = 0
Wx SNAPSHOT:
AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:
**Area 040-854 – slow white bass success on downriggers
**Area 1982 – downrigged in vic of it and vertically jigged successfully on it
**Area 1568-1983 – solid white bass action for ~75 minutes, all downrigging
Bob Maindelle, Central Texas Fishing Guide
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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