The ski boats and jet skis left the lake Monday afternoon so I decided to get back out and do a little fishing. I went up to the top of the lake to see if I could get some shad and talked to some local folks up there who said they hadn't been able to catch any and hadn't seen any shad flipping in the evening. They told me some people had gone over to the Carter bend and caught some in the brazos. Since I was catching shad late in the evening, I decided to pass on a night trip over to the carter bend of the brazos. I'd heard of a report of a guy who got his boat stuck in the brazos on a sandbar. Not sure if it was true but I didn't warm to the idea of being in a super shallow water I was not familiar with in the dark.

I managed to catch a few shad anyway after it got dark despite not seeing any or any flips. I could see small schools of them on the fish finder and just caught them one and two at a time throwing the net where I thought they were. I augmented them with a few perch the next day and went fishing. The water is pretty clear at the top of the lake. I filled my shad tank and it looked like I filled it from the tap it was so clear. Guess that's why the shad are holding deeper.

I managed to get two legal stripers, a nice sandbass and a big perch. Not my best trip, as I was only able to bat 1 out of 3 in getting the stripers in at these docks I fish, as the cables weaken my line and I get a lot of break offs. Pretty disappointing to fight a fish for several minuted and just have the line go slack. When I reel in I'll have several feet of roughed up line where I was rubbing on a cable. That said, the deep docks seem to be where the fish are. With my Helix on down imaging, I can see what I think is a big school of perch and maybe crappie at 18-24 feet. A few fish will appear in the 36 - 40 foot range right before I get a bite. I was only out a couple of hours so I was busy a lot of the time.



There are lots of green lights around but not seeing too many stripers there. A few sand bass there but not the numbers I'll see later when the ghost minnows apear in numbers. The stripers seem to come by the docks where I would normally fish for crappie at night that have big mercury lights. These docks have huge schools of perch and that seems to be what they are after. I do see a few shad down lake but think the stripers down lake are after the perch.

I caught quite a few undersize stripers and LM Bass as well as the legal size fish. I am amazed at how large a shad or perch a 16 inch striper will take. A nice perch nearly as big as your hand will amazingly go down a small striper, as will a 6-7 inch shad. I can see how this happens with LM Bass, but hard to see how this works with stripers.

Nice post and fish. Good job.

PK appears to be headed toward summer pattern. Fish in day time , moving fast and thermocline setting in ! The down riggers are everwhere...

Yep, and all but one of them sure don't have a problem coming too close to others! 25' is too dam close IMO. My last trip it was like watching a parade.

I'm not a fan of trolling. I did it for years until I figured out other ways to fish. I just gave my manual downrigger to a friend and told him he needs to have a good set of Kline's on the boat to cut that cable if he gets in a tree.

PK is not a trolling friendly lake. Randy Wood said it best "you can't fight the trees" and there are a lot of trees in PK. For people who like to troll, Texoma is a better spot. All that said, the heat in the day at PK in Summer keeps me fishing at night. I'd need a boat with a Bimini top to go out during the heat of the day.