June 3, 2011 – by Jason Hoffman
If you like to fish deep structure, now is the time to be on Lake Fork. We're catching good numbers of fish from 15 ft all the way out to 37 ft of water (depending on the day and/or time of day). My best bait has been a football jig, and the average size of the fish we're catching is right at 4 pounds. We haven't caught any giants in the last few days, but we're catching quite a few fish in the 6-7 lb range each day. I'm running a Humminbird 998c SI on my Ranger boat, and I really like it a lot. I seem to be having a much easier time distinguishing largemouth bass from white bass (sand bass), and this has made me much more efficient in finding areas that are holding fish that we want to catch.
I had been catching some fish the last couple of days in 28-31 ft of water and today, I was surprised when my graph lit up with fish in 36-38 ft of water. I knew they looked like largemouth on my graph, but I don't remember ever catching bass that deep on Lake Fork. I decided to throw at them a few times to see if we could get one to eat, and I caught one on my first or second cast. After that, it was game on, and we left them biting since my clients are fishing the Skeeter Owner's Tournament this weekend.
For you guys that prefer to fish shallow, there are still a lot of fish in the 3-12 ft range. Three to 4 ft has been best for me when fishing in the upper ends where the water has a little less clarity. I'm still pitching the Netbait B Bug around the shallow timber and our numbers are very good when we've decided to fish this way. Our average size isn't nearly as good as it is when fishing the deep fish, but it's still pretty good.
My topwater bite is almost non-existent. The lack of grass has really hurt it in my opinion (at least it has for me). We caught 3 on a popper this morning, but the size wasn't that great so we picked up our jigs!!!