For the past month, Big Sam has been as temperamental as most all our East Texas lakes have been, especially in giving up numbers of bass. The high winds, rain and weekend cold fronts have kept the bass hanging out, and as of yet, they have not moved onto the beds to do their spring thing! The last weekend of the month will see a full moon and if the stubborn bass don’t move up then, it will be April before we see any signs of eggs being laid on the beds. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen some small but catchable buck bass move into the shallows in the backs of the creeks. There were signs of some of the bigger fish trying to move into the really shallow water last weekend, but they are so skiddish, they just won’t settle down and can’t be caught (at least not by this angler!)
We were fishing a club tournament last weekend and my husband, Norman, was fishing with his partner, 15 year old John Haehn. They were fishing in our Boots Follmar Marine Skeeter 210 with a Yamaha 225 EFI which had no trouble getting to their fishing spots around the lake in the high winds and rough water. Norman caught nine keepers on Saturday around the outside of the bushes in 2-4 foot depths. While I was in the other boat with my partner, Jan Shaw, and we struggled on Saturday and ended up with just one keeper that Jan managed to scratch out of the same area. We were all using the same pattern we have been on for the past six weeks using CastAway medium action graphite spinning rods, Shimano Spirex 2000FB spinning reels spooled with 10# Trilene Big Game and rigged Texas style with Riverside Floating Air Fry’s and lizards and Zoom centipedes and lizards. When we went to weigh-in on Saturday, eight of our members, including this writer, had big fat zeros, which is very uncommon for the caliber anglers we have in our Club. There were a lot of our members with only one or two fish and that’s strange, for this time of year.
On Sunday, we went right back to the same area hoping to repeat Norman’s prior day’s success story; however, the fish just wouldn’t cooperate as we only caught small one’s where keepers had been the day before. Since nothing was happening in the shallows, we fanned out and went in different directions trying to scratch out some keeper fish for Sunday’s weigh-in. Jan and I went South and fished some mainlake points dragging Carolina rigged lizards and centipedes and Texas rigs with the same baits. I finally caught a keeper in 8-10′ of water off a secondary point on a watermelon Riverside Floating Air Fry and was very thankful for the one fish! Norman and his partner went up North on the lake to investigate some of his other places that fish had been holding but to no avail, they ended up coming back down South and finished up in the same area he started in on both days. Big fish of the tournament was a 4.42# bass caught on a Carolina rig.
On Sunday afternoon, several of our members got into some keeper fish that were caught on spinnerbaits and Texas rigged worms in the very backs of a creek on the south side of the lake and managed to catch ___ keepers from one little area. All in all, the fishing was very poor this last weekend and it was difficult for most everyone to even catch five keepers.
I talked to Scott Soission of Needmore Tackle today and he indicated that last Friday they caught a 7# bass using a “Wacky” worm and were throwing to the outside of the bushes, but it was a cloudy day, and that during the week, they had been catching their fish in the bushes in about 6-7′ depths, using “Wacky” worms on the cloudy days. On the bright days, they were catching most of their fish on Carolina rigs on the mainlake dragging on the slick or bald spots with some kind of grass nearby. He also said that fishing mainlake spots over the weekend was almost nil due to the high winds on the lake. On Monday, an 8.84 and one over 5 pounds were caught dragging Carolina rigs anywhere from the bank to about 10-foot. He also confirmed that the fish should be moving up anytime now and that when they do decide to move in the fishing is going to be fast and furious.
– Lake Mohave
– Lake Mohave
