For the last couple of months, bass fishing in the lake has been on fire. Catching 10 bass in 10 casts was the norm, along with a couple of incidences of catching 2 at a time on a single lure. While that is certainly fun, its also a clear indicator that there are too many bass in the lake for them to grow to their full potential. Earlier this year I had harvested about 80 bass, but apparently not enough. So, I invited my fishing buddy of over 50 years, Bruce Slaven, to come down and help me thin the herd a little. Bruce and I originally started bass fishing together on this same lake when we were just teenagers.
Bruce is a very experienced bass fisherman so whenever he comes down to the ranch the bass usually get a good spanking and this trip was no exception. We started fishing on Wednesday afternoon about 2pm. A cold front had blown in overnight and the gusty north wind was just beginning to settle down. But it was cold… in the mid 40’s and the temperature trajectory was downhill for the rest of the day. The lake water temp was cold too, already down to 51 degrees.
Three hours later, as the sun was starting to disappear behind the hills, the temp took an even sharper nosedive and we decided to call it a day. It may have been cold, but it wasn’t a bad day considering that we caught 105 bass in those three hours. Bruce took the big fish honors with a 6lb-13oz toad that hit a jig he was swimming just over the top of the coontail moss. That was in addition to two others he caught in the 5-6lb range.
Thursday morning, the temperature was 24 degrees when we got up, so we drank coffee and plotted strategy until about 10am. The air was cold but the fishing was still pretty hot. I ended up with one that weighed 6lb-10oz and thought I might win the lunker trophy this day.
We stopped for lunch after fishing for three hours with our total at 86 bass caught. At 2pm we were back at it again and Bruce pulled a new lure out of his box. It looked like an offshore lure as it was nearly 8” long and shaped like a large mullet. It was jointed and swam with a slow “S” pattern when retrieved. I just had to needle him a little for throwing such a large plug, but 5 casts later I had to choke those words down when he landed an 8lb-3oz pig on that lure.
When we finished fishing for the day, our total catch was 174 bass caught in 6 hours of fishing.
Friday morning the weather changed from clear and cold to overcast, windy and cool. The fishing was not quite as good, meaning we were not getting a fish on every cast like we had been the preceding two days. Bruce was still excited over his previous days catch on the monster lure, so he decided to fish it hard for an hour. It paid off with a 5lb-7oz fish, then a 7lb-7oz fish, and finally with the big fish for the trip…8lb-6-oz. The best I could do using normal size lures was 5lb-4oz. Friday ended up being the slowest day of all, with a total of only 116 bass caught.
That gave us a grand total of 395 bass caught over 2 ½ days of fishing. As for our original goal of thinning out the fish populations, we harvested 161 fish that were under 15”. Hopefully this will increase the supply of bite sized bluegills for all the remaining bass.
It also provided an important lesson on the need to “match the hatch”. A trophy big mouth bass doesn’t like to waste his time eating minnows. In the future, I will be acquiring and deploying some much bigger lures that are better suited to their dining preferences.