This past Monday afternoon, May 22nd, I fished with Mr. Jeff Sanderson and his two sons, 19 year old Kyle, and 16 year old Blake.

 

Jeff Sanderson with one of the numerous hybrid striper that helped “front-load” this afternoon’s trip.

 

Newly minted Aggie Kyle Sanderson with the longest hybrid we landed this afternoon.

 

Blake Sanderson with a mini-kraken.

Jeff is a professional landscaper, self-confessed workaholic, and has a desire to discipline himself to work less and fish more as he moves through his 50’s.  Kyle is an athletic college student studying at Texas A&M at the main campus in Bryan-College Station, and Blake is a pro-indoors gamer to the core.  On a number of occasions he attempted to draw parallels between our fishing endeavors and aspects of gaming, one of which was the pursuit of large, mythical sea creatures called “kraken”.  He proudly pointed out how he has disciplined himself to wash his hands before touching his video game controller without fail.

We started off the trip in pursuit of hybrid striped bass using live bait in deep, clear water. We hung our baits at 38 feet over a 42 foot bottom and enjoyed steady action for two hours. Live baits were the ticket at the beginning and end of the bite.  During the peak between these two times, cut bait proved quite effective.

Jeff expressed an interest in learning how the Cannon electric downriggers I have on the boat work, as he had a pair of manual downriggers on his previous boat which he has yet to transfer to his new boat due to a poor first experience when he first got the set of manual downriggers he owns.

I explain the circumstances under which I typically use downriggers, the season in which I use downriggers, and how I go about rigging up for suspended white bass and hybrid striper. We did a quick demo while it was still light out, and then actually closed out the trip doing a number of downrigger passes with the balls suspended at 16 foot over a 20 foot bottom.

Between the demo and the close of the trip, I searched unsuccessfully for white bass to vertical jig for using slabs, however, we did find some light subsurface schooling which occasionally broke to the surface. This action was caused by a white bass pursuing young of the year shad. In the area in which we witnessed this, we found fish from less than 2 feet of water up on the bank to out over the submerged river channel in over 70 feet of water. These fish cared nothing about depth, nor about topography; they were simply focused on the food and the food was near the surface.

For as much surface activity as we saw between 6:30 and 7:30, there was disappointingly little such action near sunset when such feeding is typically most common. It was for this reason that we closed out the trip by downrigging when surface feeders to throw grubs rigged on jigheads to never materialized as I hoped they would. We closed out this afternoon’s trip with 39 fish landed, of which 22 were legal sized hybrid striped bass.

TOTAL = 39 FISH, all caught and released

Wx SNAPSHOT:

TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:

Start Time: 4:30p

End Time: 8:50p

Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 72F

Water Surface Temp: 74.7F

Wind Speed & Direction: Light ENE breeze at ~6 the entire trip

Sky Conditions: Fair skies with 40% cloud cover in the west

Water Level: 0.9 feet above full pool and falling; 45 cfs release at Belton Dam

GT = 20

AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:

**Area 1269/1392 – hybrid on live shad

**Area 188/153 – downrigging demo

**Area vic 1636 – throwing grubs to subsurface whites feeding on young-of-the-year shad

**Area 1681– downrigging at 16’ over a 20’ bottom for sluggish white bass.

Bob Maindelle

Owner, Holding the Line Guide Service

254.368.7411 (call or text)

Website: www.HoldingTheLineGuideService.com

E-mail: Bob@HoldingTheLineGuideService.com

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