I fished both morning and afternoon today. This morning’s trip was an instructional trip for Armando O. of Ft. Hood. Armando recently bought a bass boat and has begun fishing in bass tournaments without success. His goals were to learn not only some reliable bass fishing techniques, but also about boat control, sonar use and interpretation, and fish location. Unfortunately, his daughter had a playground incident and we didn’t fish as long as I’d like to have, but, we’d boated 10 fish before he had to go, including 3 largemouth and 7 white bass. We picked up 4 fish at Area 79 by jigging, and another 6 fish at Area 597 over 60+ feet of water by sniping. He got a thorough introduction to sonar use, jigging with slabs, shallow water spinnerbait techniques, Carolina rig rigging and use, and boat control instruction, as well as some instruction on fish location – particularly deep structure considerations.

In the afternoon, I fished solo through and after a mild cold front’s approach which brought 100% cloud cover and strong 22mph winds during its passage, tapering to 12mph thereafter. I experienced the first consistent success of the season by way of flatline trolling today following that front at and N. of Area 116. The white Rip Shad outperformed the chartreuse Rapala here by 3-4 to 1 on a 2 lure spread.

Start Time: 6:45a

End Time: 6:30p

Air Temp: 46F at trip’s start

Water Surface Temp: 56-58F

Wind: Winds started light and variable, then blew ~10-11 sustained from the N (during which we caught all of our fish in the morning) then died until around 3p. A mild front quickly blew in and settled with winds gusting to NW at 22, then dying back to N at 12.

Skies: Skies were clear and bright up until 3p, then clouded over 100% with the front and then stayed cloudy.

Environmental Note: Blackberries began leafing out today.

TALLY = 18 fish, all caught and released