Schooling on some lakes, scattered on others
By Nate Skinner, for Lone Star Outdoor News
Striped bass, hybrid stripers, white bass and catfish are beginning to move into a fall pattern as inland lakes continue to cool off. Schooling action from stripers, hybrids and sandies is taking place on certain bodies of water, while others have provided more inconsistent results. Guides on Lake Whitney, Lake Buchanan and Possum Kingdom Lake have been able to put anglers on fish.
On Lake Whitney, Cory Vinson said the stripers are concentrated in shallow water in depths of 15 feet or less.
“Blind casting into the shallows with top-water baits has been the ticket,” Vinson said. “Dragging live shad through shallow areas has been drawing plenty of strikes as well.”
Vinson says that the fish are not real stacked up.
“You’ll catch one or two here, and then cover a 100-yard stretch or so before you get a few more bites,” he explained. “Putting fish in the box has been as simple as thoroughly covering the shallow areas. It doesn’t take long to catch them if you stay on the move.”
Vinson said Whitney is loaded with sizable stripers.
“We are catching a few over 30 inches regularly, but there are definitely more fish in the 18- to 25-inch range,” he said. “There are just a ton of 4- to 5-pound stripers out there, but fish weighing 15 plus pounds have not been uncommon.”
On Lake Buchanan, Fermin Fernandez said the stripers are schooling pretty regularly alongside hybrids and white bass on a daily basis.
“The fish have been up schooling for several hours each morning,” Fernandez said. “If for some reason we don’t find them chomping along the surface immediately, you can almost bet they’ll be suspended under the surface in the same areas where they were schooling on top the day before.”
Trolling A-rigs with 4-inch swimbaits has been Fernandez’s preferred tactic for targeting these schools of stripers, hybrids and white bass, along with casting jigging spoons.
“There’s really no particular structure they are schooling up over,” Fernandez said. “It’s almost strictly an open water deal. They are chasing shad, and we’ve got a ton of shad on Buchanan. Recently, I’ve seen schools of fish chasing shad that were as large as a couple of acres.”
The schooling action has been better when there is a steady breeze.
“They have been shutting down when it gets dead calm,” he said.
The majority of the keeper fish caught from these schools are hybrids weighing about 3 pounds. On Possum Kingdom, TJ Ranft said the striper bite has been a bit of a grind. “We have been chasing stripers for the first few hours of each morning, and then switching our focus to catfish,”
Ranft said. “There’s just been no consistency to the striper pattern. They seem to be moving all over the place and not staying in one area for very long.”
When chasing stripers, live shad has produced the most bites.
“I’ve been catching stripers in anywhere from 15 to 40 feet of water,” Ranft said. “You just never know where they are going to be. Most of them are in fairly small schools.”
After the striper bite dies down, Ranft has been finding blue cats from 2 to 5 pounds range with some 10 to 15 pounders mixed in, using cut shad in 2 to 15 feet of water.
