You can find a fish in water, but you can’t make him bite.
“It’s a little slow right now,” said Lake Fork fishing guide Eddie Garrett. “You’ll find the fish but you just can’t get them to bite.”
The heat does not turn the fish off, he said, and the fishing can actually be expected to get better as it continues to be hot.
“The hotter it gets the better they bite — they’ll bite in deep water,” he said.
Lake Fork has stood up to its reputation of producing big bass, Garrett said, with several double-digit fish being caught off his boat as recently as Sunday. But activity has dropped off the past few days.
“The top-water bite is nonexistent in the mornings,” he said. “You have to move to different holes to try and find active fish.”
Garrett said he blames the drop-off in activity on a poor thermocline, which is a rapid temperature change at a certain depth in the water. With the weather staying hot, a better thermocline should kick in, he said.
Many of the bass are holding in about 24 to 25 feet of water, Garrett said, even though he has not seen a lot of bait activity at that depth.
“Even the sand bass backed off in the deeper water,” he said.
Even on a famed lake such as Lake Fork, that’s why it’s still called going fishing, not catching.
