29 | January | 2017 | Fishing Report

This past Saturday morning I fished with Mr. Nieves Martinez and the eldest two of his six children, 17-year-old Alanis, and 13-year-old Angie.

From left: Angie, Nieves, and Alanis Martinez. For the record, it was only during the few seconds that it took to take this photo that any of us ever saw other than Alanis’ eyes from behind her blue facemask! All of these fish went 13-14.25 inches.

Angie landed the largest fish of the trip, taking this older largemouth bass from right off the edge of the Lampasas River channel in over 30 feet of water. She reminded her dad frequently that she landed the largest fish of the trip.

Mrs. Martinez gave Nieves a Fathers’ Day fishing gift certificate last year and he chose to cash it in this cool, breezy last weekend in January.

When it came to cold hardiness, Alanis and Angie were truly “polar” opposites. Alanis had her balaclava on, hands retracted up into her sleeves, her shoulders shrugged, and hot coffee going and, despite all of that, stayed cold the entire time. Angie, on the other hand, wore a hoodie with a jacket over it, but left her jacket unzipped, could care less when her hood blew down, and never really gave the cold a second thought. Nieves fell somewhere in between.

The girls’ prior fishing experience came primarily using push-button type reels on stock ponds catching bass and sunfish. Nieves had some experience fishing for white bass, but most all of that came while fishing flowing water for spawning fish in the spring. So, this would be a new experience for all aboard.

Given the cold water and today’s sky conditions, we found the fish to be pretty lethargic. We located lots of fish at just about every area we searched, but had to focus on staying consistent with our presentations in order to get results.

Regardless of depth (we began in 26 feet of water and ended up in 42 feet) we found the fish behavior to be the same. The fish would first appear on sonar tightly bunched on bottom. Once we began hooking fish and reeling them in, the school would slowly lift upwards and spread from the bottom upwards to the lower half of the water column (i.e. rise to ~13 feet in 26 feet of water, or rise to ~22 feet in 44 feet of water). Since these fish were too high for us to reach with a traditional jigging tactic, we used a very slow version of smoking to get our baits consistently in front of the more active suspended fish.

Nieves really took a liking to snap-jigging, so he covered our fish near bottom while the girls and I covered those up off bottom. By the time 10am rolled around, our thin cloud cover had completely dissipated, the wind slacked up, and the fish throttled way back. We motored to what would be our final area to fish right about this time with exactly 90 fish landed. I let everyone know that, given the fishes’ decreasing activity level, we’d all have to focus on technique in order to break the 100 fish mark. Everyone buckled down and, by 10:50, fish number 116 came over the side. When Nieves polled the girls, Alanis said she was ready for a warm car, Angie was good either way, and I could tell Nieves could have stayed out there with me jigging all day if he could have. Nevertheless, being a good dad, he decided to call it day while the experience was still positive for everyone, so, we headed for the dock.

TALLY = 116 FISH, all caught and released

Wx SNAPSHOT:

28JAN17