This evening we experienced the single most productive trip of the 2011 season thus far with 159 fish boated, every single one of which was a white bass. I was joined by a great crew from Rockpointe Church located in Leander, Texas. My guests were Shane M., who leads the church’s small group ministry as a volunteer, his 12 year old daughter, Grace, and the church’s senior pastor, Shayne O.
Shane M. was the “sponsor” of this adventure. His stated goals were for his daughter to catch a lot of fish, and to give his pastor a stress break.
Everybody caught fish and plenty of them tonight — 159 in all. That’s Shayne O. (L), Grace M. (C), and Shane M. (R)
Pastor Shayne O. of Rockpointe Church in Leander, Texas, landed the best fish of the night — a white bass just shy of 15 inches. He must be living right!!
This was the group I lamented NOT having taken out on Monday (see that blog post previous to this one) when a inaccurate forecast led me to postpone their trip. Fortunately, their schedules were flexible enough to allow them to be on the water as we experienced this evening’s pre-frontal conditions with characteristic warm, stong S and SSW winds. Indeed, only hours after coming off the water, lightning began to flicker in the night sky and Bell County came under a severe thunderstorm warning as the winds turned quickly out of the north and blew hard all night.
We met up around 4:15, did some dockside coaching and then began the hunt for fish.
We zeroed at our first attempt. Next, we found a strong congregation of fish, although they remained relatively unresponsive (due, in part, to the fact that it was still a bit early in the evening), right at Area 757. We boated 8 fish there and then they turned off.
Next we hit nearby Area 759 and experienced basically the same thing, finding good numbers of fish, but only having an initial response with no sustained action. We boated 12 here before they turned off.
At what would be our next and final stop of the trip, we got right on top of Area 760. This was the shallowest of the areas I’d looked over thus far, at only 24-27 feet deep. We passed over only once, I saw what I’d hoped to see, got a buoy on the fish, and then set up over them in a hover to jig. Initially, we focused on the fish immediately beneath us using a smoking technique with TNT180 slabs in 3/4 oz. The first few fish we caught were smallish, and, I saw on sonar that fish were pursuing lures but not striking, thus leading me to downsize everyone’s baits to a 3/8 oz. profile. This definitely helped, coupled with the fact that we continued moving toward sunset with its normally increasing fish activity levels. Long story short, we sat in this one area for nearly 3 hours straight boating fish after fish after fish for a total off this area of 139 additional white bass.
Once the smoked slab bite died off, we used a ‘blasting technique out beyond the boat and continued to pick up fish. As these fish were reeled in and drew curious schoolmates with them, the close-in bite picked up again and Grace took full advantage of that, given that she had a preference for “smoking” with a slab anyhow. In fact, she got so good and so consistent at this technique toward the end of our outing that we teased her saying, “Grace hath no mercy!”
As is typical, a few minutes after the sunset, the bite finally died and we packed up for the ride back to the dock.
Most of our fish were 1-3 year old fish, with but one anomaly — that was the largest fish of the trip taken by Shayne O. — that fish went ~14 7/8″ and just shy of 2 pounds and was likely from the year class of 2006 or earlier.
Our grand total tonight was 159 fish. I was relieved that we’d had an even better day than I could have provided this great bunch of folks on this past Monday.
…and Shayne, in the spirit of forgiveness, I do forgive you for turning off the trolling motor in the middle of a hot bite, and for snagging the buoy line about 3 minutes after that(LOL)!!
TALLY = 159 FISH, all caught and released.
TODAY’S CONDITIONS:
Start Time: 4:15p
End Time: 8:10p
Air Temp: 84F at trip’s start.
Water Surface Temp: ~68.5F
Wind: Winds were SSW14 the entire trip with occasional, brief higher gusts.
Skies: Skies were fair.