Your Boat, My Lake — 73 Fish with Clay and Brandon

This past Tuesday morning I fished a multi-species trip on Stillhouse with Clay Lohse and his friend, Brandon Edwards, both from Abilene where they work together as nurses.

IMG_3394

Clay Lohse with a late-morning largemouth taken on a slab out of a school of white bass we found holding tight to bottom in 32 feet of water.

IMG_3390

Clay Lohse and Brandon Edwards with our largest white bass of the trip, a 14 7/8″ fish which, judging by its tail, has had a rough life.

Clay had come out with me once before on an instructional trip to Lake Belton in May of this year.  On this go-round, he wanted to use his boat and gear, which he fishes with regularly on Fort Phantom Hill Reservoir, but still have me take the lead in the fish-finding so he could observe the approach I took to summer fishing.

I normally would decline such an arrangement, but I knew Clay’s equipment was sufficient to help find and catch fish, including his Humminbird Helix 12 sonar, Minn Kota Terrova trolling motor, and Cannon Easi-Troll downriggers.  The only equipment I brought was my thumper and rods with Redneck Model 180 slabs complete with Hazy Eye Stinger hooks, rods with tailspinners, and my downrigger rods with 3-armed umbrella rigs tipped with Pet Spoons.

We fished a shade over 4 hours and landed a total of 73 fish comprised mainly of 2 and 3 year class white bass.  The majority of our fish came on downriggers with a few more falling to vertical tactics on both slabs and tailspinners.

One of the biggest lessons Clay picked up on was how important it is to be prepared to get baits down quickly to fish see on sonar (in our case, while downrigging) so as to get the first fish from out of a school hooked, thus creating some commotion and preventing the rest of the school from continuing to move off.

Since last Saturday, as the heat has really come on strong and the surface temperature has bumped up another 1.5 degrees, I’ve noticed the mid- to late-morning vertical slab bite has declined,, as has the early morning topwater feed by largemouth.  I’ve had no problem finding fish — lots of them, in fact — but getting them to perk up and chase baits veritcally has been another story.  The downriggers’ horizontal presentation definitely has the edge right now.

Clay and Brandon tagged on a self-guided nighttime bow fishing trip on either end of their trip with me and then headed back to Abilene on Wednesday.

TALLY: 73 FISH, all caught and released

TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:

Start Time: 6:15a

End Time: 10:40a

Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start:

Water Surface Temp: 85.7F

Wind Speed & Direction: SSE breeze under 10 mph the entire trip

Sky Conditions: 60% cloud cover

Water Level: 0.12 feet high and slowly falling with only evaporative losses of ~0.02 feet per day; 0 cfs release at dam

GT = 50

Wx SNAPSHOT:

25JUL17

 

AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:

**Area 484 to 485 to 444 – low light downrigging  mixed with occasional vertical jigging stops early under murky skies

**Area 1970-453 – mid-morning downrigging

**Area 458-1436 – late morning downrigging leading to light vertical action to close out the morning

Bob Maindelle

Owner, Holding the Line Guide Service

254.368.7411 (call or text)

Website: www.HoldingTheLineGuideService.com

E-mail: Bob@HoldingTheLineGuideService.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/bobmaindelle

Twitter: www/twitter.com/bobmaindelle

Leave a Reply