So I've had spotty luck hooking up with white bass in schools. For those of y'all with more experience, what's your feeling about the distribution of schools throughout a lake? Do all the fish form into a single school? Is there a graduated distribution of sandies in schools and wandering around by themselves? Does a lake the size of Granger or Decker Lake have several schools which hold the preponderance of fish? How many fish in a normal school? Does it all depend on the lake and the conditions?

This may be a fuzzy question, but I'm interested in people's observations or gut feelings. You have to figure there's a countable number of fish in a lake, and they all have to be _somewhere_.

ingvar3000: I can't speak about small lakes, but in the large ones I fish (Cedar Creek, Tawakoni, Livingston, Ray Hubbard, Waco) there are 10,000's of white bass scattered around the lake in various sized schools. I see them on the bottom with my depth finder as I go around checking structures (humps, points, road beds, ridges and drop-offs). Ninety-five + per cent of the time that's where they are. They can be in schools of 10 to 20 to schools of 1000's and anywhere in between. If you are looking for them schooling on the surface, you'll only find them there a very small per cent of the time. I stopped looking for surface fish years ago and now always go look for them on the bottom on structures. The key is learning what they look like down on the bottom. This time of year more often than not the pattern looks like little bumps (fire ant mounds) spread out close to one another along the bottom. Hope this helps.

Ingvar, I agree with everything Dennis said. If you have access to a side scan unit you can prove it to yourself, my guess is whites and hybrids occupy about 20% of the lake at any given time.Without sidescan these days I feel lost, or at least severely hamstrung when it comes to finding the big concentrations of fish. Cold water temps in winter seems to make the fish gather in certain areas, as spawn happens in spring about 2/3 of the fish migrate into the creeks and rivers(my estimate by observations) the rest stay in the lake and try to spawn on wind blown points and sand bars. After spawn, they roam the shallows a while and seem to be scattered all over the lake, as the water warms they slowly gather into larger schools and seem to congregate around humps, and structures. I think they roam allot, and may jump from one school to another, and can be scattered by boat traffic at times. Seems the shallower they are the more likely they will scatter with boat traffic. These are all observations on Somerville ,where I have some 40 years of experience. Keep a log book of your success and failures by the month, and record water temps. In a few years you will see the pattern they follow, the pattern repeats year after year, and the log book will tell you where to fish, date and water temps are the two biggest factors. Things can vary with lake levels, warm vs cool years, as well as from lake to lake. You can shorten your learning curve by reviewing old posts on here and recording dates and water temps, and fish depths, when they give them. Reports that Mr Christian writes on here would be a good place to start.

Learn to find fish and how to catch them is first and foremost.

I’ve often wondered how many millions of fish the larger lakes have in them. I think we all would be blown away with how many fish are in our lakes.

Michael, you have caught, released or filed most of them at one time or another! LOL

Research shows a mature female White Bass will produce between 250,000 and 1,000,000 eggs each Spring. Not sure what small % would make it but that's a lot of eggs!

I've seen some schools of fish on RC that are acres in size and stacked up on the bottom several feet deep. Also seen fish on a top water bite as far as the eye can see in every direction.

I have no idea but I'd guess that our 45,000 acre Lake has a number that is well into the millions.

I've seen lots of small ponds dry up, and have been amazed by the number of fish. Since a large lake contains even more species, the number of fish would indeed blow you away.

Dennis C, ML56...as simple as your advice sounds it is awesome advice. Thanks.

Thanks for the insights! I think I'm picturing it better now. Basically I need to up my electronics game.

Great question and observations above. I find that I move around alot trying to find the huge schools. The smaller schools are in the 10-20's; and I'll catch one here and there. But once you hit the larger schools in deep water (40-50ft), then will occupy half the water.
column. Then it's game on. it takes multiple moves 5-10 in a given day to find them. Of course, thumping brings them in. I need to do a video on this!
Tim