White Bass

[wily]

A friend of mine and I were lucky enough to fish with Ivan Martin last weekend. Well, I wouldn’t really call it fishing, it was more like catching. Ivan always says that grand lake has more white bass in it than any other lake in the country, and after friday, I tend to agree.

As we arrived the weather was unpredictable with the possibility of storms, the wind was up and that made the fishing uncertain, at least during the boat ride. As soon as the big motor was shut-off we jumped up and dropped the spoon and each of us caught a fish in the first two minutes. After that I’d say any doubt was gone. I’m certain in the four hour trip we caught over a 100 fish between the three of us.

The places we fished were within 5 or 10 minutes of Martin’s Landing. Martin’s Landing has a lot to offer as a home base on grand lake. It has a convenient location, a good ramp, and courtesy docks and it only costs $3 to launch your boat.

Ivan, and my friend used structure spoons. They’d make a short cast, and let the spoon go to the bottom and then jig it up about 18”. I used a white Baby Torpedo mostly and caught a ton of fish on top. My fish on average were not as large as the spoon fish but they were plenty fun. I also used the spoon and a swimming minnow. I caught a couple on each but I preferred fishing with the top-water plug.

One place the water was twelve foot, another was twenty-two and another was thirty. The fish in thirty foot water were larger but they were suspended which made spooning more difficult because they had to gauge the depth w/o the bottom, but the top-water worked at each spot.

The thing about where we fished was funny, We weren’t fishing spots, we were just fishing general areas. I’ve driven my boat past these areas many times, albeit about 50 mph. We were fishing out in the middle of the lake about 200 – 600 yards from any visible structure. Basically just fishing flats near the river channel in the main lake. You kind of had to keep an eye to the sky and watch the birds.

If you go, go early or late. We started about 630am and the best fishing happened before 10.

[Quillback]

Thanks for the report, once I get moved down to NW AR I'll have to give this lake a try.