Stillhouse Fishing Guide Report – 14 November 2009 – 56 Fish






I fished a half-day evening trip with Jason W. of the Salt Lake City, UT, area. Jason was sent by the Army to Ft. Hood for some training and decided to sample our local fishery while enjoying some weekend downtime.


Here’s a “macro” shot of the eye of a white bass. Their Latin name is “Chrysops” which means golden eye. You can see why …

Start Time: 1:00p

End Time: 6:15pm

Air Temp: 76F at trip’s start.

Water Surface Temp: ~68.3F

Wind: S at 13, then slowly turning SE after 5p, then tapering to calm by sunset.

Skies: Skies were partly cloudy, with the air fairly humid in advance of a cold front due in late tomorrow.

In our pre-trip communications, I let Jason know that our trip would likely start off slowly, as the 11:30am to 3:00pm window is just a predictably slow time on Stillhouse under typical circumstances. In trying to compensate ahead of time for this, I netted live shad which, when fish are in a neutral or negative mood, can hedge your bet a bit.

We started off simply searching for bait concentrations on sonar and finally began to ping some frequent, concentrated schools of shad suspended at 12-17 feet down over 19 to 30 feet of water. We swept the area with sonar looking for gamefish relating to the shad, and found both bottom oriented and suspended fish. We focused on the bottom oriented fish using live shad. On the very first drop, not seconds after I got my tightline adjusted, I had a hit (probably from a white bass) that stripped my bait off. I racked my rod up since we were obviously on fish, and just ran the trolling motor so we could focus on Jason’s efforts. Over about an hour’s time, we both hovered and drifted with a drift sock, all the while experiencing about a dozen strikes and landing 2 fish, both average white bass of about 11 inches. All of this was in the vicinity of Area 035, and to the NNW of it.

At one point, while motoring back upwind for a drift, I passed over a substantial school of suspended gamefish in the vicinity of Area 536. This was a clear sign of increasing gamefish activity, and so we racked our bait rods up and turned to downrigging to see what might happen. In very short order we boated 10 white bass, including 2 instances where we had doubles on. After about 35 minutes or so, these fish thinned out at about the same time the wind took a bit more of a SW turn and the skies cleared a bit of the thin haze that had persisted thus far.

I got that “sixth sense” feeling that we’d see an uptick in action pretty quickly in response to that weather change. We headed to Area 537, and, upon idling in saw sonar literally light up with both suspended fish and fish within 3-4 feet of bottom and on bottom itself.

Jason and I both geared up with slabs (TNT180’s in 3/8 and 1/2 oz. — Jeff carries them at Salado Creek Outfitters) and went to work on these fish. This was the kind of scenario where I just really appreciated having an accomplished angler on board, as he instinctively knew what was happening and, with just a bit of refinement on his technique, caught fish after fish right along side me for about 45 minutes straight. We caught a mix of predominantly white bass (adding 39 more of them to our tally) and a few smaller largemouth bass (3 to be exact, all of which were very pale from much time spent in this deeper 24-26 feet of water). We caught fish by lift-dropping out horizontally, as well as by smoking and jigging. We had our best success using the lighter slabs in the vertical mode and better luck on the heavier slabs in the horizontal mode. We left this area at around 4:50p with 54 fish boated, after the action died as the wind turned SE again and began a slow taper toward calm by sunset.

Jason had indicated a desire to learn bass fishing techniques on this trip, and, since he’d had a great introduction to slabbing, we then tried to get him on some Carolina rig fish. We began at Area 089. I worked a blade bait and immediately got one short largemouth as the bait neared bottom on my first cast. Jason worked on getting the feel for the Carolina Rig but we never scored on that.

We then moved to Area 532 to put him up a bit shallower so he could feel the Carolina Rig in the rod tip a bit better given the rocks, etc. on bottom here. He did get the feel of things, but we still didn’t connect with fish here.

We made a stop at the irregular bottom feature near Area 540, and got just one short crappie here.

We moved on to Area 541 and scratched, then returned to Area 540 looking for some last minute white bass action, but scratched there, too. It now being dark, we called it a day.

TALLY = 56 FISH, all caught and released








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