Fishin’ Buddies! — 49 Fish – Stillhouse Hollow — 18 June 2011






This morning I fished a “Kids Fish, Too!” trip for Cub Scouts-about-to-turn-Webelos Garrison L. and Cameron A. from the north Austin area, accompanied by their dads, Mark L. and Chip A.


Cameron with his best largemouth of the day taken from around huge schools of young of the year shad on a Pet Spoon.


Garrison with one of many downrigger’ed white bass we took today from down around 22 feet.

Mark and Garrison have fished with me before on several occasions and, upon hearing that Cameron enjoyed fishing but hadn’t been all that successful on prior outings, decided to invite him and his dad along for today’s trip.

As we got started, we did some casting basics using underspin reels at dockside in case we ran into schooling action heavy enough to allow the boys to throw into the fray. We spent about 40 minutes looking closely at the already choppy water for signs of topwater action. We did finally spot several small schools of largemouth in the vicinity of Area 827/8/9, but they were moving fast, appearing only briefly, and in a wind already above 10mph. I cast to the action for the boys and let them retrieve through the schools. Garrison landed 1 largemouth this way and Cameron got two serious follows but came up clean on them.

As we maneuvered around the Area 827/8/9 vicinity, a consistent band of bait was showing at ~33-35 feet. Where this band of bait intersected the bottom, white bass were working them over along the bottom. I spotted these on sonar just as the last topwater we saw was dissipating. We got our slab spoons down amongst these white bass and began boating fish. We put 16 fish in the boat from out of these schools. The potential was there for much more, but, the boys were young and their ability to be consistent with their technique was still limited, so we didn’t maximize that potential, but, still caught a bunch of nice whites to the point where Cameron said, “Mr. Bob, my hand hurts from reeling those fish in.” (I took that as a compliment, regardless of how it was intended.)

After topwater, and after slabbing, we then broke out the downriggers (variety is the spice of life and all the more so when you’re a young boy!). We downrigged with our ‘rigger balls set at ~20-22 feet for both white bass and schoolie largemouth ghosting along with the abundant bait found along the circuit from Area 821 to 453. The increasing wind (now 15mph+) made boat handling a bit tricky, and bite detection very tough, but we managed to boat 18 more fish in this area, all on Pets, by about 11:00am. We landed 2 largemouth (1 keeper, 1 short) and 16 white bass in this effort.

To put one final chapter in this story, we wrapped up with a calmer-water sunfish excursion to a protected cove, fishing in the vicinity of Area 824 with slipfloats and maggots for 14 more fish, including redear sunfish,longear sunfish, bluegill sunfish, green sunfish, and one blacktail shiner.

By around 11:30 the sun was growing hot, the boys’ concentration level was diminishing, and it was a good time to call it a great morning and start working on fish stories to tell mom.

TALLY = 49 FISH, all caught and released

TODAY’S CONDITIONS:

Start Time: 6:45a

End Time: 11:30a

Air Temp: 78F at trip’s start.

Water Surface Temp: ~82.4F

Wind: Winds were up at S8 by sunrise increasing to S17 by trip’s end.

Skies: Skies were fair, dry, and bright.








Leave a Reply