This morning I fished Stillhouse Hollow with Lorene Love and Bob Kloss of Temple.  Lorene presented Bob with a fishing gift certificate for his birthday a few weeks back and today was the day they chose to cash it in … and they chose well!

Lorene Love and Bob Kloss put 72 fish in the boat today under bright conditions with stable pressure in the wake of last week’s mild cold front.

Although the topwater action still hasn’t turned on to its fullest extend, each day of hot weather sees a bit more of this action beginning to emerge.

Bob is a U.S. Air Force veteran who has worked all over the coastal U.S. in the oil industry, and who now drives an 18-wheeler for a living.  He looks a bit like Tom Selleck.  Lorene is an information technology professional turned private investigator working in Killeen.  So, I kind of felt a bit edgy this morning between Bob’s looking like Magnum, P.I. and Lorene actually being one wondering if they had run a credit check on me before coming out fishing, or not!

We have had a return to more moderate atmospheric pressure and stable, fair weather conditions, and the fish have responded well as compared to last week’s roller-coaster ride thanks to a cold front’s arrival on Thursday and some murky grey cloud cover in the late week.

As we begin most summertime trips, I do an introduction to the techniques that we’ll use before we begin hunting fish so that when we come upon what we are looking for, we don’t waste valuable time learning a tactic while the fish are ready and willing to bite.  Well, as I was instructing Lorene on the use of a spinning rod equipped with a slab, she caught a fish during this “practice session” and so we just knew it was going to be a good day.

As we got going we put several white bass in the boat at the very first stop we made just minutes after concluding the “practice session”, and then were fortunate enough to find fish schooled heavily enough as to allow us to use our vertical jigging tactic to fish for these fish more thoroughly than the downriggers would allow for.

After this action died down, we headed to new fishing grounds and encountered an actively feeding, bottom-oriented school of fish in about 33 feet of water.  Without ever running the downriggers, we got right down to fishing for these fish vertically and, after they slacked off over a 25 minute period or so, continued right on catching them out away from the boat by casting blade baits horizontally.  The lure of choice for this application was the Cicada blade bait.

When the casting failed to produce any longer we also gave downrigging a try, but these fish were done biting by then, so, off we went to what would be our last (and most productive) stop.

The last area we fished even smelled of shad as we pulled in, indicating some below-surface feeding was going on.  Sonar quickly revealed that the area was blanketed with white bass over a ~40 yard radius, and we parked right in the middle of it all without another boat in sight!  We pulled 3 fish from the fray on downriggers as we idled into the area, then I shut the outboard down and we fished both vertically and horizontally for the next hour taking fish after fish in the 2-3 year class, along with 2 school-sized largemouth bass.

If there is one commonality on the location of these fish since the thermocline has formed and the weather has stabilized it is near shad in 30-34 feet of water.  I’m finding fish on all manner of terrain (flats, break lines, sharper drops, etc., but every single place has 30-34 foot water and massive schools of shad.  By “massive schools of shad” I mean shad schools that stretch for 30-40 yards and are 5-6 feet thick and which are so densely packed together with shad that they reflect as much sonar sound as a hard, rock bottom does.

So long as our weather is stable, the bite will remains stable.

 

TALLY = 72 FISH

 

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TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:

Start Time: 6:45am

End Time:  11:45am

Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start:    75F

Water Surface Temp:   83.1F

Wind Speed & Direction:    NE6-9

Sky Conditions:    Fair with 20% cloud cover.

Other: GT=0

 

AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:

**Area   1260 – 1112 downrigging and smoking

**Area    1225 – 1226 smoking

**Area   1425 smoking (with topwater present)

 

 

Bob Maindelle

Owner, Holding the Line Guide Service

254.368.7411 (call or text)

Salado, TX