OUTDOORS

WITH LUKE CLAYTON

White bass are fun to catch and excellent table fare regardless whether they are caught during their annual spawning run up rivers or secluded creeks or right now when they have wrapped up their procreation efforts and are in giant schools on the open waters of main lake.

Last week, my friend Jeff Rice and I joined Lake Ray Hubbard guide Brandon Sargent for a few late afternoon hours of fast paced catching on the lower lake. At the dock at Sapphire Bay Marina, Brandon outlines his plan of attack.

“We’ve been enjoying some red hot white bass catching the past few weeks. The spawn is a wrap now and fish are roaming the main lake in huge schools. We might have to do some checking to find them but, once we do, we’ll likely limit out from one spot,” says Brandon as he begins rigging our rods with his handmade lead slabs.

“Luke, I know you have fished with slabs for many years, but I’m betting you haven’t seen one like this,” Brandon says as he holds a bait up to my ear and shakes it. I could hear a rattling sound inside the lead bait. Now, there is nothing new about rattles placed in baits. Vibrating crank baits such as the famous Rat-L-Trap have long employed rattles to entice fish to strike but rattles in lead slab spoons was an entirely new concept that I had never seen. Brandon has incorporated a sleeve with a BB type rattle inside the lead baits. The round BB creates a rattling sound when the bait is worked through the water.

Slabs are the ‘go to’ bait for vertical fishing below the boat for white bass. Look in the tackle box of any ‘sandbass’ fisherman, and you’re likely to see an assortment of white or chartreuse colored slabs in sizes ranging from halfounce up to one ounce. Slabs are great for vertical fishing because they fall like, well, the chunk of lead they are and perfectly mimic a wounded baitfish when worked properly through the water column.

Our first stop was some submerged levees out from the marina and the sonar on Brandon’s big 24 foot guide boat evidenced a few fish holding on the windward side of the submerged bottom structure. We stopped and fished a few minutes and managed to catch a couple of fish but this was definitely not what our guide was looking for. We motored to a structure not far from the power plant with the same results, an occasional strike with few fish showing up on the graph.

Our trip was just after the passage of last week’s cold front and Brandon guessed the fish might have gone into a bit deeper water. A boat ride across the lake to some submerged gravel pits on the east side of the lake ensued. A glance at the graph proved his guess to be spot on! The pixels on the graph’s screen plotted thousands of fish, mostly white bass, holding around clouds of baitfish that had also gone deep after the cool front.

As most fishermen know, the Livescope has been a game changer in locating and catching fish. The units show the exact location of fish and your bait in real time. We no longer need to guess the bait presentation that triggers strikes from our targeted species. A glance at the screen gives one a clear, concise image of what’s going on below the boat. Drop a lure into a huge school of white bass and they will usually ignore it until the bait is quickly cranked up above them. This pattern almost always entices several fish out of the school and, thanks to the aggressive nature of feeding white bass, one will usually attack the lure. In past years before today’s advanced electronics, we white bass anglers had a smorgasbord of bait presentations, one of which would usually produce action on any given day.

Jeff and I quickly picked up on the bait presentation with the ‘rattling slabs’. The drill was to give the bait a ‘pop’ of the rod which caused the rattling sound that the fish could not resist. Our guide is well tuned in to the fact that schooling fish are attracted by sound, and he keeps a trolling motor with a splasher churning water on the surface and a thumping unit called a Bobo’s Thumper striking a plate which transmits sounds below the water, mimicking feeding fish.

With the prop churning water on the surface and the thumper sending vibrations down into the waters below the boat, coupled with the rattling of our baits, the school of white bass we were fishing went on a feeding frenzy. I learned to ‘shake’ the rod tip to create rattling sound with the slab as I allowed it to fall and, very often, I would feel slack line as a white bass picked the bait up as it was falling. I like to use a level wind bait caster reel when white bass fishing. By keeping my thumb on the spool I can ‘feel’ a strike while the bait is falling. The drill is to quickly engage the reel and jerk up on the rod tip, setting the hook. When the school of feeding fish turned on, catching was extremely easy. Simply get a bait down, and a greedy white bass would latch on to it. I’m convinced though, our success was largely due not only to our guide’s uncanny ability to find feeding fish but the artificial feeding sounds created by the units on board and the rattles built into our lures. A meal of very fresh fish is the highlight of any fishing trip and, back at the dock, we used one of Brandon’s fish cooking recipes. In a freezer bag, we placed the some freshly caught white bass fillets, olive oil, the juice from 5 limes and lemon pepper. Grilled until a slight crust formed on the fillets, this was some of the tastiest of fish I’ve eaten in some time.

Jeff Rice filmed our fishing adventure for our TV show “A Sportsman’s Life”. You can watch it on Carbon TV www.carbontv.com or YouTube right now!

Contact Brandon Sargent at 469-989-1010.