GEORGE WEST — Boats pushed by putt-putting outboards coastal flats boats, jon boats, wide-beamed ski boats loaded with three and four people cruise up and down a single stretch of the Nueces River. They wave as they troll by the spot where Ray Austin and I are casting toward the middle of the river. Sometimes they talk about how many fish they're catching. With the exception of fishing for speckled trout at the Bolivar Pocket near Galveston, this is about as close to combat fishing as it gets in Texas. People are standing shoulder to shoulder or gunwale to gunwale, casting to the same water, trying to catch the same fish. The boats maneuver past each other, running their lures through the boat's wake before heading around the bend to turn around. Every one of them sports a Sputnik antenna nest of rods hung over the side. Almost every one of them has at least one white bass in the process of being reeled in or tossed into an ice chest. Everybody is happy. Everybody is cordial. It's white bass time in Texas. Austin, an Elgin fishing guide who chases catfish, crappie and white bass from Lake Tawakoni to Choke Canyon, had e-mailed me to say the females had begun to show up on the Nueces. I met him here in George West south of San Antonio, and we headed downriver from the U.S. 59 bridge. The Nueces is really two rivers: the narrow, crackling, rock-bottomed beauty that flows off the Edwards Plateau above Uvalde and the still, broad, green-to-muddy classic river of lower South Texas. Today, we're fishing the lower end of the river. White bass, the striper's smaller cousin and half of the genetic mix used to create hybrid stripers, occur in the state's major river systems. When they begin moving upstream each year to spawn, anglers travel with them, usually to whatever natural rock formation or dam stops the fish and forces them to begin their communal spawning activities. On the Colorado River that often is the shallow riffles around Colorado Bend State Park. Lake Travis whites often move up into the Pedernales when there's enough water for them to swim. Most anglers try to rush things in Central Texas, hoping the annual "white bass run" will crank up in January or early February. It does that in South Texas, where water temperatures in the Nueces were at 56 degrees last week. It takes a little longer for the water to get warm enough for them to move upstream in Central Texas. Although a few small males may already be showing up in Central Texas rivers, most of the larger fish, the egg-bearing females, are still staging in the deeper waters of lakes like Travis and Buchanan. "The fish in the Nueces are heading back up toward Choke Canyon," Austin says. "They go on up above George West to where the water gets really shallow. There are some people already fishing up there, but the females mostly haven't gotten there yet." In Choke Canyon, whites move up the Frio River and San Miguel Creek in the same way. Austin said he'll keep fishing the white bass until the crappie begin to show in the wide, broad Nueces. The more traffic-sensitive crappie seem to hide out during the day and move to shallower water at night. "Then, if you've got lights and minnows, you're golden on the crappie," he says. Crappie do the same thing in a way that white bass do, often moving upstream from lakes into creeks and rivers during the spring spawning period. They settle in brush piles and logjams, where they spawn. Austin says he prefers to fish on weekdays, especially during the white bass spawning runs. "You probably don't want to be on this river on the weekend," he says. "The parking lot will be full and the river traffic will be unbelievable." The statewide limit on white bass is 25 fish per day with a 10-inch minimum. Ray Austin can be reached at 512-663-7166. mleggett@statesman.com ================================================ Fishing reduces stress and gives you a break from our modern world where everything is going a million miles per hour 73 Check & Clear 6 LOC: 38-54-14.60N / 097-14-09.07W |
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