Turnover = Tough — 33 Fish for the Sward Brothers, 19 Oct. 2014

During the afternoon of Saturday, 18 Oct. I fished with brothers David and Robert Sward as a birthday celebration.

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(L to R) Brothers David and Robert Sward hung tough with me through a slow 3 hours to enjoy a solid 1-hour twilight bite tonight as we faced both turnover and low-wind conditions.

David is a U.S. Navy Vietnam-era veteran from Austin, TX, where he retired from the Veterans’ Administration, and Robert traveled in from Arizona for a few days’ visit with his brother.

We had a number of things working against us this evening, chief among them the annual occurrence of “turnover”.  Turnover happens when cool autumn weather and shorter days chill the warm, upper layer of water and causes it to sink down into the cooler, lower layer of water. When these previously separated layers of water mix, the temperature becomes uniform from top to bottom and the entire water column gets oxygenated sufficiently to support life. Fish can be found at all depths and are typically very scattered.  Aside from this, we also had very light east winds — as the old saying goes, “Winds from the east, fish bite least.”

We just picked and pecked for our first 3 hours on the water picking up just 4 fish and missing a fifth as a largemouth bass hit David’s bladebait and then jumped and threw it.  I saw fish and bait scattered everywhere down to as much as 58 feet, but finding concentrations of fish and/or fish that were willing to bite was just hard tonight.

Finally, around 6:00p, I began to notice (on the nearly flat-calm surface) schools of small shad, about 1.25 inches in length, working over the surface at the lower end of the lake.  Oftentimes the conditions that allow for this activity also allow for gamefish to go on the prowl.  As I began to slowly idle in and around these pods of baitfish, I began to pick up sonar returns of coalescing schools of white bass beginning to feed.  We got our 3-armed umbrella rigs down among these fish at ~43 feet over a 50 to 80 foot bottom.  The action continued to build to a peak over the next 45 minutes during which we took singles, doubles, and triples on the spoons used on the umbrella rigs.  Around 6:45p, we encountered a large shoal of fish numbering around 300-400 individuals.  I e-anchored the boat over these fish and we dropped 3/4 oz. TNT slabs down below them and worked them through the fish, quickly putting 16 fish in the boat in under 10 minutes until the school disbanded.  We boated a total of 29 fish in our last hour during this twilight feed.

The feed ended right at sunset.  For our efforts tonight we boated 33 white bass.

TALLY = 33 FISH, all caught and released

 

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TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:

Start Time: 3:00p

End Time:  7:15p

Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start:  82.3F

Water Surface Temp:  76.8F

Wind Speed & Direction:  E3-5

Sky Conditions: 50% cloud cover on a fair, blue sky

Other: GT=0

 

AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:

**Area  1458 to 1460 to 1458 produced 29 of our 33 fish this evening.

 

 

Bob Maindelle

Owner, Holding the Line Guide Service

254.368.7411 (call or text)

Salado, TX

www.HoldingTheLineGuideService.com

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