I fished a half day “Kids Fish, Too!” trip this morning with Mr. Paul S. and his sons, Tanner and Ty, of Temple. The boys had some basic fishing skills down before they arrived, and we reviewed the use of both spinning gear and closed-face gear at dockside before starting the day’s hunt for fish. We had storms in the early evening last night that resulted in cooler, overcast conditions this morning with a NW to N breeze puffing at 5-7 mph the entire trip.

Tanner with a nice downrigged white bass taken from a suspended school of fish

Ty with a beautifully colored bull bluegill taken on a slip float rig up shallow

Start Time: 6:20a

End Time: 12 Noon

Air Temp: 69F at trip’s start, heading towards the mid-90’s with clear, calm conditions.

Water Surface Temp: ~82.1F

Wind: Winds were W at 3 at sunrise, then went SE at 1-2 by 9:00am

Skies: Skies were clear and bright.

At sunrise, we searched for topwater action and found only light, briefly appearing schools of white bass in the vicinity of Area 017. To do well in this scenario, quick, accurate casts were a must. The boys did their best and did land a handful of white bass by casting Cork Rigs to these fish, but I saw we were going to be hard-pressed to excel at that, so, we turned to downriggers to help us out. By around 9:35am we’d boated 14 white bass from between Areas 017 to 204 to 205. As the novelty of these two techniques wore off, it was clear that a change of pace would be a good idea.

We headed out in search of some sunfish and found a good supply of them holding at the transition from weed to rock near Area 189. The boys wore these fish out with slip-cork rigs, boating 27 sunfish at this single stop.

We then searched for some congregated deep-water bass to fish for but found little despite 3 immediate strikes upon anchoring at Area 193.

As we reached the end of our trip, the boys requested that we make one more sunfish run. This time we headed to Area 200 and finished off the day with an additional haul of 9 sunfish here.

TALLY = 50 Fish