This morning I fished with brother and sister Jaylon W. (10) and Kaylee W. (4) of Ennis, Texas. They were chaperoned by their aunt Stephanie while visiting their Uncle Steven and Aunt Annie in Belton.
Persistence paid off! After many casts fell short or didn’t quite land on target, Jaylon plopped his soft plastic down at the right place and at the right time and plucked this 15.5″ largemouth from out of a school that briefly appeared on topwater.
Here Jaylon and his Aunt Annie pose with Jaylon’s largest white bass taken via downrigging.
We started our day with 4 aboard and ended the day with but 2. No, scurvy nor pirates weren’t the issue, but, rather, a stomach bug that hit Miss Kaylee not long after catching her second fish of the day. I’ve never had someone get seasick in freshwater aboard my boat, but this had all the trappings, if you know what I mean…
So, Aunt Stephanie and Kaylee were returned to the dock, leaving Jaylon and I to battle a lake full of fish without assistance.
First, we looked for topwater action at sunrise, and found little.
Next, we downrigged the Area 039 to Area 041 vicinity thoroughly and did very well, consistently putting quality white bass of 13+ inches in the boat on every pass we made. We used doctored Pet Spoons in a tandem fashion on two ‘riggers, thus putting 4 baits in the water at a given time. On two occasions we landed two fish at a time on the tandem. We left this area with 21 fish boated.
As the downrigging action slowed a bit, we noticed two blue herons making patrol flights out over open water and so we drove over for a closer look and saw what they were interested in … schoolie largemouth pushing shad to the surface. We “matched the hatch” with appropriately sized soft plastics and put 5 keeper largemouth in the boat in about 45 minutes’ time. The potential was there for much more, but, Jaylon is a novice caster and we had to work through that to enable him to catch his own fish, but, after a while and some missed fish and some coaching, he got the hang of it and did just fine.
Once the largemouth sounded, Jaylon was itching to get back and do some more downrigging, so, we returned to the area of our previous success and found the fish had drifted to the west by a few yards, but were still there and hungry. We boated 3 more and then decided, both for variety’s sake and to cool off a bit with the breeze a boat ride would create, to check another location. In the vicinity of Area 823/457 we boated two more fish in our last 15 minutes on the water before Aunt Annie was spotted driving to the pickup point and we knew we had to reel our lines in and scoot.
As we return, we got permission to spend a few more minutes doing one last thing … using a pole (no reel) to catch sunfish. We baited up with maggots and a float over at Area 239 and put 3 fish in the boat very quickly just to whet Jaylon’s appetite for this technique he’d never seen before.
TALLY = 34 FISH, all caught and released
TODAY’S CONDITIONS:
Start Time: 6:30a
End Time: 11:00a
Air Temp: 73F at trip’s start.
Water Surface Temp: 83.4F
Wind: Winds SE2 at sunrise then barely moving from the SE thereafter.
Skies: Skies were hazy and humid due to multiple light thundershowers yesterday, with 20% cloudiness.