AUSTIN, Texas - It’s hot out here on the lake. The thermometer is pushing 100 degrees, and boat seats heat up lava-like in the sun.
But there’s a cool breeze from the southeast, and the promise of thousands of white bass feeding near the surface.
This makes the furnace-like heat more bearable, especially as guide Tommy Tidwell lines up his landmarks for the “Outhouse Hole.” That’s the name I give the spot because Tidwell uses a door to a rest room on shore as one of his marks to get close. He also uses the image of the lake floor on his fish finder to zero in on just the right spot.
I lob a white slab spoon, one of Tidwell’s making, toward the dam on the lake. A big white bass, sucks it up before it’s a foot below the surface and begins a thrashing, slashing fight toward the boat. As the fish gets close and finally sees the hull, it uses a last burst of energy to make one more run and then gives up.
Tidwell is fighting a fish of his own, so I maneuver the white so the needle-like fins and razor edged gills are pointed away from me.
The goal is to remove the hook without serious injury to me or the fish. I toss him back.
Around us, small schools of white bass - threes and fours and fives - are relentlessly ripping through fleeing shad, sending the smaller fish bursting through the surface in a vain attempt to escape the feeding fish below.
It’s impossible to know exactly where to cast but the water seems the right place, so I just let fly with the heavy slab, knowing that it really doesn’t matter where it lands. There’s going to be a fish right there.
Actually, more than one. As I bring one to the boat, two others are frantically trying to grab the spoon from its mouth and escape with what they think is going to be an easy meal. I release this fish as well.
We catch more than a hundred in just about two hours on this hot summer afternoon. I can’t give an exact number because we lose count. I can honestly say that there were no more than a dozen casts during those two hours when I didn’t hook up with a white bass, and on some of those I could just drop the slab back to the bottom and bounce it around until I got a fish to hit.
“When these fish are here like this, you can pretty much have a fish on all the time,” Tidwell says. The Georgetown teacher has been guiding on Granger forever and made his name on the big crappie that he puts clients on.
“I fish for crappie most of the time now, but I started guiding on white bass,” he says. “Sometimes they’ll be back up on the flats in shallow water schooling, and there will be acres of them. But right now, they’re down here feeding on these shad, and you can catch them on these slab spoons pretty much all the time.” The whites, native fish in most of the rivers and lakes in Central and East Texas, are prolific spawners and their numbers can run into the hundreds of thousands when they’re schooling on shad.
The shad, which are spawning and which move in large shoals in open water during the summer and fall, drift across the schools of whites and eventually get driven to the surface by the aggressive larger fish. The whites are a little like wolf packs, rushing up through the abundant schools of shad and scooping them up as they flee.
Many of the fish we caught regurgitated partly digested whole shad, which is a common occurrence during schooling times in the summer. One of them threw up a baby largemouth nearly 4 inches long, something that’s unusual and isn’t supposed to happen.
“I’ll catch these fish on into the fall and there are lots of days we’ll fish for crappie for a while and then come down and catch the whites, too,” he says.
Tidwell guides for white bass, crappie and catfish on weekends during the school year and every day during the summer. He can be reached at (512) 365-7761.
