This evening I welcomed cousins Margaret Lee and Jarod J. aboard. Margaret Lee, a 6th grader, lives in N. Austin, and Jarod, an 8th grader, lives in Keller, TX.
The cousins double-teamed some unsuspecting white bass and largemouth tonight!!
The kids’ dads, John and Robert, are brothers and used the trip to catch up with one another as the kids fished. Since Jarod hadn’t done all that much fishing before, we started off with the basics targeting sunfish in shallow water with simple, light gear. In 30 or 40 minutes’ time the two managed to land 17 fish, including bluegill sunfish, longear sunfish, green sunfish, and one black-tailed shiner. We caught these in less than 3 feet of water on balsa slipfloats baiting up with maggots.
The second chapter of this story unfolded in deeper water and targeted white bass and school-sized largemouth I’d found earlier in the day along a “circuit” from Area 822 through 453 through Area 820 to Area 821. As soon as we arrived in this area, the bait was again located up high in the water column and so were the fish. We never dropped our downrigger balls below 15 feet despite fishing over 40+ feet of water part of the time along this circuit. Jarod and Margaret Lee really worked well together after we got through the initial learning curve. I steered the boat and kept us in contact with the fish; each of them “claimed” one of the two rods we had working. Once a rod had a strike, one of the kids would reel in the fish while the other would quickly bring the downrigger ball back to the surface, thus avoiding tangling the hooked fish in the gear and getting us ready to get the line back in the water fishing again. Once the fish was boated and released, the person who caught it would get their line back behind the boat the appropriate distance and would then clip the line into the release clip and lower the ball back to the depth I was seeing fish at. As John put it, they were a “well-oiled machine”! This efficiency did allow us to maximize our fish-catching potential here. In about 2 hours’ time, we boated exactly 33 fish here in roughly a 1:3 largemouth bass to white bass ratio.
By 6:05, after landing our 50th fish of the trip, I offered a little change of pace for our last hour on the water. I suggested that we could use live bait on downlines to target potentially larger fish, but was careful to warn that the pace of such fishing would be slow and that there were no guarantees on this size. The kids liked the idea of learning a “new method” and so we went in search of monster bass. I checked several areas, finally seeing some positive sonar readings at Area 825. We put 3 baits down and let things settle down a bit. Not long after, our first rod went down, and up came a just-legal largemouth, then another, then another. 3 largemouth in all fell for our baits with 2 others “hitting and missing”. These fish were all “cookie cutter”, right at 13-14 inches. No monsters for us tonight, but, the kids got exposure to yet another way to pursue our finny quarry.
TALLY = 53 FISH, all caught and released
TODAY’S CONDITIONS:
Start Time: 6:45a
End Time: 12:15p
Air Temp: 75F at trip’s start.
Water Surface Temp: ~82.8F
Wind: Winds were light from the SSE at around 5 at sunrise, increasing to SSE11, then tapering back to SSE8-9 by 10:45.
Skies: Skies were fair.