This morning I fished Stillhouse Hollow Reservoir with Jon Ashby of Abilene, TX, and his 8-year-old grandson, Christian, of Colorado City, TX. The two “road tripped” in last night, found a nice local hotel with a pool to relax in, grabbed a burger at the marina where we were to meet this morning, and were up bright and early to come out and catch some fish.
Jon Ashby and his grandson, Christian, brought in a boat-load of white bass today on both downriggers and slabs.
Jon is a professor at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, home of “The Cowboys” where he teaches on the subject of audiology, among other things. He also owns his own audiology practice there.
Fortunately, Stillhouse continued to produce very well under the current stable weather conditions we are enjoying. We caught fish from less than 10 minutes into the trip and kept catching fish right up until minutes before putting the boat back on the trailer.
As we got going this morning we encountered a loosely schooled congregation of white bass in the same vicinity that multiple, massive schools of small shad were found in. We used one 3-armed umbrella rig and a tandem rig to present 5 baits at one time right at the depth the white bass were using. Pass after pass yielded anywhere from 1 to 4 fish per pass for the first 2.5 hours of our trip.
Just as that school begin to disperse and lose interest, we spotted some surface activity that led us to even more white bass action. This time the fish were in the lower third of the water column and tightly schooled enough to allow for a vertical jigging approach to be used. We broke out the spinning gear with 3/4 oz. TNT180 slabs and went to work. The fish bit aggressively for the first hour, then continued to bite, albeit with less enthusiasm in the final 45 minutes or so of our trip.
Since Christian has a small body of water near his home, I was sure to show him how to use a pole and line to catch sunfish from the shore by doing a little “sunfish demo” near the boat ramp as we wrapped up our trip.
By 10:30 the fish action was waning and the sweat was starting to pour, so, we called it a great morning and turned our thoughts toward lunch and air conditioning. We boated 51 white bass and 1 sunfish.
TALLY = 52 FISH
CLICK TO RETURN TO FISHING GUIDE’S HOME PAGE
CLICK TO RETURN TO FISHING GUIDE’S FACEBOOK PAGE
TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:
Start Time: 6:30am
End Time: 10:30am
Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 76F
Water Surface Temp: 85.5F
Wind Speed & Direction: SSE7-8 increasing and shifting to SSW10-12 by trip’s end
Sky Conditions: Cloudless, fair skies
Other: GT=20
AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:
**Area 1245-258 Downrigging for white bass
**Area 856-868 Smoking for white bass
**Area 200 Sunfish
Bob Maindelle
Owner, Holding the Line Guide Service
254.368.7411 (call or text)
Salado, TX