Sorry fella's, but this is a very late report. I was on vacation and acted like a bum, just because I didn't have to work.
The original plan for my vacation was to head up on to Lake Fork (I live in south central Texas) and hire a guide to do some white bass fishing. That was planned for the 23rd of October. Due to Mother Nature, we ended up calling the trip on the 19th. My pal Ernest Coburn, called up guide Jess Rotherham of texascrappiefishingguideservice.com, and he was open on that Friday. We didn't know if the weather would cooperate, so we were looking for something local. The weather held and we fished Lake Austin.
We caught a decent amount of fish, so the action was steady, but the crappie never really turned on. Being from Canyon Lake, the crappie in Lake Austin were monsters. All of the keepers averaged about a pound, and we weighed one in at 1.2lbs. Now, I know a lot of y'all have seen much bigger, but like I said, the quality of the fish there was super impressive compared to my home lake.
We caught all kinds of species, so that was fun. We caught a few whites, a giant bream, a nice healthy yellow cat, a few black bass, and some undersized crappie. While we didn't limit out, we had enough for some good table fare. Jess is a really fun guy to be around, and he gave us some homemade jerky and dried sausage that he whipped up in his smokehouse. That was a VERY nice bonus. All in all, it was a great time on the water. We ended up with 7 keeper crappie (all huge, by what I'm use to), one nice yellow, a skillet sized bream, and a keeper white for the ice box. Ernie's wife cooked up the crappie for us that night, and it was fantastic.
We were using minnow tipped jigs, for the most part (jigs were by dan@dansjigs.com) and the two colors that produced were the Candy Girl and the Mean Green jigs. After awhile, we tried straight minnows and caught a few with that presentation. We used Pro Angler crappie rods and Shimano Shimano Symetre 1000 spinning reels, lined with 10lb NanoFil. All fish were caught on brush piles in 20ft of water.
I'm not in these pics, by the way, because I'm the nerd that had to get the pics with my phone. That's Jess holding the yellow cat and Ernie (no head) is in the lighter colored shirt. Enjoy!






Steven

Nice work guys. Sounds like a fun trip.

Awesome post. Thanks for sharing.

Sounds like a good trip. Glad you had a good time. That's one good thing about minnow fishing, you never know what will bite.

Nice report and pics!

Good job Jess!