Catching fish can be a challenging endeavor, especially when conditions change quickly and patterns that have been as constant as the Polar star fail to produce bites.
Such was the case with a striper fishing trip at Lake Texoma last week with my friends at Striper Express.
Most regulars at Texoma know the huge influx of runoff water the past month muddied the waters and made striper fishing tough. Lure fishing was not existent, but live bait fished in some of the clearer waters continued to produce fish. Catching was all about knowing the areas to fish and this often changed on a day-to-day basis.
My friends Jeff Rice and Larry Weishuhn and I had a trip scheduled for several weeks with Bill Carey, the “Old Man” as he calls himself of Striper Express Guide Service, and Capt. Lil’ Dave. Bill started what has now become the largest guide service on the lake about 42 years ago and with its team of experienced guides on the water sharing information on a daily basis, it’s hard for the stripers to hide.
I first fished with Lil’ Dave a couple decades ago and watched him fine tune his fish catching skills through the years. Most ‘regulars’ at Texoma know Lil’ Dave’s fish catching ability; he’s known as one of the top guides on the lake and has developed a large following through the years. Dave keeps a live bait tank in his boat and if the stripers aren’t hitting lures, he doesn’t hesitate to toss that big cast net and fill the tank with lively shad. Shad are the primary food of Texoma stripers and Dave’s plan B when artificial won’t work almost always produces a big table of fish at the end of the trip back at the cleaning station.
The day before our trip, Dave spotted the first topwater feeding fish he’s seen in weeks down in the lower section of the lake. His clients were expecting to fish with live shad and after the first few hours of daylight, the mission was accomplished; Dave and clients were headed back to Mill Creek Marina with limits of good eating stripers including a few tipping the scales in the upper teens.
When we arrived at the dock well before sunrise, Dave and Bill had decided that the water clarity might just be good enough to catch topwater feeding fish on topwater plugs. I noted the live bait tank in the boat just in case.
Rather than go straight to the spots that had been producing break of day action on live shad, we headed to the dam and began blind casting Pencil Poppers, hoping to draw a strike from the occasional surface-feeding stripers we spotted. Nary a bite after about 15 minutes of tossing plugs.
Then the Corp. of Engineers threw us another curve.
The warning horn sounded at the dam indicating the gates were being closed to slow the flow of excess water through the lake. Fish can sense subtle changes in their environment and the ten or fifteen guide boats within sight began to leave the area, probably to begin dropping live shad which had been the ‘go to’ method of putting fish in the boat.
“Boys, we’re running a bit late for that very early live-bait bite but I think I can catch some shad in the back of that cover over there,” he said, pointing to a cove a half mile or so to the east. Two tosses of his cast net and the bait tank was filled with very fresh live shad. Although we might have missed that every early live bait bite, I had hopes Lil’ Dave could pull a striper out the hat and put us on some good live bait action. Dave is good at pulling rabbits and stripers out of hats!
Dave eased the big Falcon out of the cove and pointed to bow toward open water. We soon slowed to idle speed and I watched a big slope show up on the graph.
“I’m not seeing a concentration of stripers but rather schools of fish on the move," observed Dave. "Let’s anchor on the side of this ridge and get some baits in the water. I don’t expect nonstop action but I bet we can fish from the small, fast-moving schools. The change in flow of water has definitely put the fish on the move.”
A debris line from the recent flooding plotted a false bottom on the graph and the fast moving striper schools were running just above. We soon had frisky shad in the more clear water above this line and Dave studied the graph with intensity.
“Here they come boys,” he would say every time a school passed under the boat. “Get ready!”
We proceeded to catch or miss strikes every time Lil’ Dave sounded the alarm. These fish were moving fast and they were hitting hard. No “peck, peck” on the bait, but rather the rod tip would slam down and you either had the fish hooked or, you didn’t. When the action slowed in one area Dave would fire up and head to another spot he hoped would produce.
We caught fish from each location, including a ten-pounder landed by Jeff Rice which was the big fish of the day. I gave Jeff the title of “Big Fish Jeff.” The previous week, he landed a 40-pound blue cat that I mentioned in last week’s column.
This time of year the slab (lead spoon) bite is usually underway in the lower portion of the lake. Huge schools of stripers chase shad in long runs that are sometimes a mile or more long. A technique we call ‘leap frogging’ occurs as anglers position boats just above the striper schools and after the school moves through, fire up the engine and position the boat ahead of the fish for round two of catching.
Both our guides predicted this bite to kick off any day; possibly it’s going on right now! I love to catch hard-fighting stripers by any method that produces but the jolt of a fast-moving striper hitting a slab fished under the boat has to be experienced in order to be fully appreciated.
I see another trip to one of my favorite fisheries with great friends in my very near future. Hopefully you can get out on the water and “get you some.” The flood waters have dissipated and the summer pattern is setting in.
Email outdoors writer Luke Clayton through his website www.catfishradio.org . Watch our weekly TV show “A Sportsmans Life”, found on Carbon TV and YouTube this week for a show dedicated to this week’s fishing trip.
