Big Guadalupe bass in Lake Travis

This weekend is sort of a repeat of last weekend in that my daughter's high school band has yet another marching competition. My son has a birthday party to go to in the afternoon so I basically had a couple of hours this morning to fish. And fish I did.

This time, I launched from Jones Brothers Park in Jonestown which is just about 15 minutes from the house. I mostly stuck to a narrow arm of the lake across the park and fished along the shadowy cliff side.

The morning was cool in the mid 50s and the water is still warm in the 70s so there was a light fog on the glassy smooth water. It was beautiful. It was also much different than last weekend in that the skies were clear and blue.

I was tempted to tie on a top water fly but really wanted to try the experimental seaducer along with an all chartreuse cactus minnow I tied last night. The cactus minnow was the first fly tied on.

I love to target the corners of docks or any structure/cover that has a corner as I tend to find bass usually near there. However, I started with the cliff walls throwing the fly as close to them as possible. I was rewarded with a couple of small Guadalupe bass.

I continued working the docks and cliffs picking up a couple of more bass. Some of them gave themselves away as they chased baitfish up to the surface. Once I got into the sunshine away from the cliffs, I didn't get much action so I paddled back to where I started and had caught bass and worked along the other way.

By this time I had switched to an all olive and black seaducer and as I cast it to the back corner of a boat dock I saw a big hit and felt the rod bend as the fish dove deep. This is typically the sign of a good Guadalupe bass as they tend to want to dive while a largemouth surfaces and shakes its head.

The bass circled the front of my kayak and I got to see him and he was impressive so I pulled out the net and hoped it wouldn't come off. Once landed, I measured it and it was just shy of 16 inches. For this species of Texas native bass, this is a trophy size fish as they don't normally get much larger (the water body record for this lake is 18.25 inches at 3.69 pounds). The fish easily went over 2 pounds. I released the fish and packed it up for the day.

I was really pleased with the fish I caught in the two hours on the lake. I got a new personal best for a Guadalupe bass and it was on an experimental fly I tied. Couldn't get any better.