After a successful scouting trip during the last 90 minutes of light yesterday, I felt very confident that the forecast calling for SW winds today would bring success.
I contacted Eric M. of Belton last night when I saw the forecast. He’s been patiently waiting for over 2 weeks for me to hand-pick a good day of fishing weather so he could experience first-hand the vertical jigging techniques I use throughout the winter. Today, his patience paid off.
Eric M. with the largest of our 83 fish taken in 34 to 39 feet of water today via slab spoons — a 4.75 pound, 20.50 inch largemouth.
We launched at 1:30pm, just as the day’s winds came to a peak of ~16 mph and stayed ramped up at that speed for about 90 minutes. This brought with it the best fishing of the trip. We hit our first location — a deep flat — at Area 724 (BA: 12KW) and jigged for 16 white bass and then saw action at Area 337/723 (BA: 9KW). At this location (the end of an underwater spur), over the next 2 hours we boated 49 more fish, including one white bass measuring 15 3/8 inches, and a largemouth bass (our only black bass of the day) which measured 20.5 inches and weighed 4.75 pounds, as well as two drum. We used a straightforward jigging approach here, as well as a lift-drop technique for Eric to tuck away in his bag of tricks for future use.
By 4:30, the wind had rapidly tapered off to under 6 mph, and the fishing slowed down right with it. We’d peeled all the fish off Area 723 that I felt we could, and so we went looking elsewhere. From 4:30 to 5:10, we looked at several areas and found little, until coming up on Are 329 at around 5:20p. At this area (a small underwater knoll), we found fish right at the shallower edge of the breakline in about 34 feet of water. We put 6 fish each in the boat in no time and then, like a light switch being turned off, the action stopped. I’ve seen this many times when a school of large predator fish come on the scene (largemouth or gar), but, we did not hook or land any such thing. We did re-establish contact with fish now suspended at 20-30 feet down over the adjacent river channel.
It was here that Eric got his final lesson for the night — instruction on “sniping”. This method involves singling out individual suspended white bass on sonar and working a lure near them with ultralight spinning gear in such a way as to provoke a predatory chase and eat response. Eric really got the hang of this quickly and put the final 6 fish of the night in the boat via this method.
We finished up our trip at sundown with a total of 83 fish boated for our efforts. I expected that we’d do well today, but I was actually surprised at how well we did, given the extended extreme cold of the last 5 days and the ~7 degree surface temperature drop we experienced over that time.
TALLY = 83 FISH, all caught and released
Today’s Conditions:
Start Time: 1:30p
End Time: 6:15p
Starting Air Temp: 51F
Water Surface Temp: 46.8F
Wind: WSW14-16 slowly tapering to SW3
Skies: Clear