On Monday, my old bass fishing buddy, Bruce Slaven, made the trek to the ranch for a few days of hard core fishing. Bruce and I have been fishing together at Moody Lake for 59 years, starting back when I was 17, as soon as I got my first drivers license and my first car. Back in those days, if we managed to catch a half dozen bass in a day we thought we were bass fishing pros.
Just one day earlier Bruce had finished 4 straight days of fishing in a couple of tournaments at public lakes in north Texas. He had one day in which he caught zero fish, another with only 8 fish. His luck was about to change.
Conditions were perfect, temps from mid 60’s in the morning to upper 80’s by late afternoon, and the wind was light and variable. Water clarity in the lake was 36″+, making it easy for bass to spot our lures. We untied the pontoon boat from the dock about 1pm, and Bruce caught his first fish before we had drifted 10 feet. The bite was as hot as I have ever seen it, and by 5pm we ended with a total for the first afternoon of 187 bass caught and released. That’s and an average of one bass every 90 seconds.
Tuesday, we put in a full 8 hour day and ended up with the largest one day total we have ever caught. Our previous record was 195 bass in a day. This trip, when we stopped fishing at about 5pm, the clicker showed 232. No trophy size fish, but a fair number of fish that would have been over 5 if we had fished a couple of months earlier, prior to the spawn.
On Wednesday, we finished out with another four hours using topwater lures. Usually the action slows down on the last day, but that was not the case this trip.. Early morning action on a shallow flat in the southwest corner of the lake was non-stop. At one point I got two at once on a whopper plopper as shown in the video below. We caught about 50 bass from that one area before we started moving down the dam.
We finished the morning with a final count of 103. Almost every fish was caught on top with Bruce walking a dog and me twitching a whopper plopper. When a fish missed the lure, all we had to do was keep it moving and we would get hit over and over until we hooked up.
Our final tally was a new annual fish spanking record. Our total count for approximately 16 hours of fishing was 522 bass, making for an average of one bass every two minutes of fishing. Our wrists were sore, and our thumbs bleeding.
No wonder I’m so spoiled when it comes to fishing.