Fishing Tawakoni with Omar Cotter- 2005
What a blast this day was, Brian brought his fance camera and let me play big shot while Omar kept us on the fish, great day!
White Bass at night
I guess I was real fortunate. My father introduced me to fishing as early as I can remember. His mother and father were avid fisher-people that spent their weekends at Lake LBJ and Lake Buchanan. My mother’s parents owned a ranch on the San Saba River outside of Menard Texas which offered river fishing plus several ponds that were loaded with fish. I grew up outside of Stephenville Texas and our neighbor down the road allowed me to fish his tanks that had monster largemouths. All in all, all I did was fish, fish and fish.
Now that I’m older I look back and realize how lucky I was and how many different ways I learned to catch different species of fish. The one way I enjoyed the most, along with my father, was fishing for white bass at night. To this day it still drives me as the best way, and simply enough, the easiest way to get out and catch a mess of fish.
My earliest recollection of fishing under lights was on Lake LBJ. My father’s parents spent a lot of time at a lodge known as Fullers; it goes by a different name now. I was most likely a bigger pain than I was worth but it was there that I first learned the power of above and underwater lights. They always seemed to bring in the fish, so good that one time my grandfather proved to me he could use a coke can tab with a treble hook tied to it to catch white bass as they frenzied through the glass minnows and shad. It was, to say the least, relatively easy.
As I got a little older I spent many weekends with my grandparents. They were crappie dock crappie fishermen and darn good if I do say so myself. I struggle to catch half the fish they caught but it didn’t bother me because I knew they were good, and because I was more interested in what was to come when the sun went down. No, I was 12; I was interested in night fishing for Sandies.
By this time my grandparents spent most of their time at HiLine Lodge on Lake Buchanan. It was a prime place to dock fish for crappie by day and fish for whites by night. At dark we would set out our above-water lights and wait for the baitfish to pour in. Some nights the baitfish were so thick that you could feel them pound your line as you waited for a school of whites to move in.
Lights work for a couple of reasons. Baitfish use the light for protection as they swim in circles around and around in a schooling sphere. Fish feed mainly on silhouettes and by using bright illuminations you produce a new area they can identify and attack their quarry. Basically you are creating a counterfeit moon, if you will. Buchanan didn’t have any major cities around to dribble light from, so, on most any night the luminosity of your locale was the best place to eat in town.
110 volt flood lights with an aluminum hood and a clamp were what I used for years in my dock fishing days. It was when my father purchased our first fishing boat that we moved into a different realm of light. It was a halogen bulb sunk in a ½ pound of lead with protection wires to keep from breaking the light. I can no longer see the maker but at one point I could make out that it was made in Austin Texas. My first encounter with such a unit was on a 4 day campout above Lake Amistad and did it do the trick.
On this specific trip I remember most everyone using this underwater type. Once the sun went down we would go out, anchor and tie our boats together, lower our lights and wait for the glass minnows to come in. Glass minnows are usually the first to arrive followed by assorted minnows and they, followed by the king of all baitfish, shad! I had just turned 16 and when the sun went down I was about to learn another major lesson in night time angling.
Being that I was 16, I no longer put fish first when the sun went down. In any case it was much different than the initial approach my grandfather had taught me which was using 2 or 3 jigs at a time to produce double and triples time and time again. Here we scooped up the baitfish in minnow nets and placed them on the hook. Once the fish moved in we would drop the hook, line and sinker in and very seldom would it hit the bottom before you were on. Many, Many limits were caught in those four days by fishing all night and sleeping all day.
I’ve tried many lights out since but I still use the old hunk of lead and my father still wants it back. People ask me all the time about night fishing and my answer is candle power. Green lights are now available and, yes, they will catch fish. What they won’t do is create radiance far beyond the boat and “light up the lake”. This argument will go on and on so my answer is, to each his own. I, however, am still loyal to the beast.
Light, light, light, but what about the tackle? That is the second most popular question I get asked. I love slabs or jigging spoons as most call them, but for this type of fishing I tend to leave them out. I stick with 1/8th and 1/16th ounce crappie jigs. Some lakes that have striper and hybrids might provoke me to move up to something with a heavier hook but that is the beauty of this rig. I simply put the heaviest jig on the bottom, the next size above and often the next on the very top of the 3 jig combo. I use a typical fishing knot on the bottom so if I get hung up I won’t always lose the jigs up top. I use a loop knot about 14 inches above the bottom jig, snip it to where it is just one line versus a loop and tie my jig with a worlds fair knot. The loop knot is imperative to saving the upper jigs if you should get hung on the lower jig. I then tie a loop knot at the top and place the whole rig on a swivel. I rig these up and save them on an old Styrofoam cooler lid so I don’t have to waste time re-rigging.
The only time I will use a slab is if I get in a school of dinks. In that circumstance I will go to a big 1 plus ounce slab to weed out the yearlings. When I am fishing for white bass with slabs I always top it off with a crappie jig to lure yet another fish, but, in this scenario you simply cant. The dinks will get it before it gets down to the big un’s.
Magnum sandbass Flashback II
Heres another podcast that is about 5 years old, I loved the intro!
By the way, the product review I did mentioned some new pliers I had just bought. I still have them and they are still great.
Magnum Sandbass Flashback
Remember when MSB used to have podcasts each week? Well, its time for some more but I wanted to share a couple of the first ones that had some pretty good content. Enjoy!
