I fished a “father and sons” trip today with David and Cory C. and their dad, Vernon C. David is from the DFW area and Cory traveled in from the Houston area just for this trip with Vernon, who has retired to the Temple area. This was all done as part of a Christmas present to him from “the boys”. For all 3 men, most of their fishing experience up to this point came as boys through Boy Scouts and involved bank fishing for smaller fish with basic tackle. I hoped to “up the ante” with some quality fish for their time spent on the water today.

Fishing was a bit tough today as you might expect with a damp east wind, but, the cloud cover and clear and warming water trumped that to some extent and we put together a decent take by day’s end.

Vernon took big fish honors today with this 23 inch, 5 1/8 pound hybrid.

Dave (L), “Pop” Vernon, and Cory (R) with one of 13 hybrid we boated today on live threadfin shad.

Start Time: 7:00a

End Time: 2:15p

Air Temp: 66F at trip’s start.

Water Surface Temp: ~66.1F

Winds: Winds were E at 10-12mph.

Skies: Skies were grey to the point of occasional mist all morning.

Long story short, I knew fishing would be a bit tough today given the E. wind, so I planned on using live shad now that the threadfin shad spawn is taking place. We saw no topwater action, no helpful bird activity, and even sonar readings on areas where we did find fish were sparse at best.

We found fish in two locations today.

First, around 8:00am, after spotting fish on sonar and failing to get them to respond to a downrigging approach, we put tightlines down and drifted along the 20 foot contour between the shore and Area 347 and were rewarded right away. We boated 2 largemouth and a crappie here and missed several more fish as the fellows got used to the hookset from out of the rodholders.

After this area quieted down we did some more looking and found fish at Area 294. Another boat was in this vicinity and was doing very well, so I asked if it was okay with them to fish nearby. All was well, so, we anchored down and baited up and did put a hybrid and a small bluecat in the boat with 2 other fish missed, but we just weren’t right where I’d preferred to have fished on this area and I certainly didn’t want to crowd the other gentleman, so, we departed to search out other action but found nothing.

We returned to Area 294 at around 11:30am and found no other boats fishing, so I anchored us over top of bottom-hugging fish showing on sonar and we began to catch fish located just SW of Area 150. The action was slow but consistent, and, in about 2 hours time here we boated another 12 hybrid as well as 2 more blue cat and 2 white bass, with quite a few missed strikes.

Our hit to catch ratio was a bit low today — 21 fish caught on 57 shad used — that’s about 37%. We did chum with our dead bait and I know that brought in some small blue cat, but we had a good number of solid hits that brought the rod tips right into the water and then they just sprung free. Need to experiment with hooks and leader lengths a bit more I suppose.

One funny episode took place as we were nearing the end of the trip. We had just a few shad left in the shad tank, and the water spitting out of the aerator was making it tough to see the remaining fish. I asked Cory to “pull that black rubber plug” — meaning to separate the electrical lead on the 12 volt power source that powers the aerator. Well, Cory did exactly what I asked him to, only the black rubber plug he pulled was the drain plug to the shad tank!! We all looked at each other in a bit of disbelief when we heard a strange sloshing sound on Cory’s side of the boat and then had a good laugh when we all realized the miscommunication that had taken place.

All in all a fair trip with some good fellows.

TALLY = 21 FISH, all caught and released

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