10 | March | 2016 | Fishing Report

This afternoon, 10 March, I fished with brothers Kim and Keith Herald, originally from Nebraska.

Keith Herald of Nebraska took this nice 6.50 pound bluecat from amongst a school of deep white bass in 63 feet of water.

Keith also caught this largemouth within feet of the same area that gave up the large catfish.

Kim Herald of Killeen shows one of the 133 white bass we caught this evening on a combination of slabs and bladebaits. This is a 2-year-old fish from the 2014 spawn.

Kim and Keith are both retired from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad where Kim served as a conductor, and Keith as an engineer. The pair cut their teeth hauling coal out of the Powder River area during that “boom” time, back when as many as 6 men worked a single train.

After doing his homework, Kim decided to retire to the Killeen area about 6 months ago, and Keith just made the 13 hour drive down to see him.

Given such turbulence in our weather and such rapid change in our weather conditions, I was uncertain about what to expect today. I did do a recon in advance of our trip to see how far the mud plume extended downlake from the Lampasas River mouth. Discolored water can be found all the way down to Union Grove, which means I would be fishing even farther downlake than than. I just do not like fishing muddy water.

We found two significant concentrations of fish today. The first was in deep, clear, open water along the river channel in 63 of water. We located these fish after 3 previous unproductive stops. We found a variety of year classes of fish here, from 1 to 3 year old fish, along with a single largemouth and a single blue cat that went 6.50 pounds. We stopped fishing here after catching exactly 100 fish in order to roll the dice to head shallower for the final low-light bite of the evening.

This gamble paid off well. We were fortunate enough to find about a dozen Forster’s terns working over an 80 yard stretch of water on a day when few birds were working anywhere, and those that were working were working over loons. Anyway, these birds put us onto a strong concentration of fish in 25-27 feet of water, allowing us to work bladebaits along the relatively flat bottom for another 35 fish boated here before the birds and fish quit at the same time, right around 6pm.

We went on to catch only one more fish after this shutdown — a small white bass that took a flatline-trolled crank in ~16′ of water.

We wrapped up the trip with exactly 136 fish, including 133 white bass, 1 blue catfish, and 2 largemouth bass.

TALLY = 136 FISH, all caught and released

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TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:

Start Time: 2:30p

End Time: 6:30p

Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 60F

Water Surface Temp: 60F

Wind Speed & Direction: NNE16, steadily tapering to NNE9 by (obscured) sunset.

Sky Conditions: 100% grey skies with a light mist or drizzle falling most of the trip.

Water Level: 624.11 and rising with 622.0 being full pool. 0.01 feet of water was released in the last 24 hours due to heavy releases from other Brazos watershed lakes. Water discolored to downstream of Cedar Gap.

Other: GT= 40

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