How Far Do White Bass Travel Upstram to Spawn
Location, timing key to catching river-run white bass
A winter or early-spring day on the water during the annual white-bass spawning run in Texas rivers can provide some of the fastest, most enjoyable fishing an angler tin feel. Or it tin be fruitless and frustrating.
Centre ground between these two extremes is almost as rare as iii-pound white bass. And oftentimes, the divergence betwixt bass-a-cast activity that tin accept an angler landing a 25-fish daily limit in about that many minutes and hours of fishless flailing can be little more than the distance of a good cast.
"They tin can be in a pretty pocket-sized surface area," Jane Gallenbach said of the white bass she pursues from her River Ridge Guide Service and Campground situated on the Sabine River upstream from Toledo Curve Reservoir. "If yous're not in that sweet spot, yous're not going to take hold of many fish."
Concentrating efforts on areas most likely to hold fish is a given for all fishing. Simply it's fifty-fifty more of import when targeting whites in river systems, where the fishes' social and biological drives conspire to concentrate them in very specific, and oftentimes very small, areas.
Force in numbers
White bass, more and then than well-nigh any other freshwater species Texas anglers pursue, are schooling fish. They are not lone ambushers like largemouth bass. They spend their developed lives as members of a big grouping - a wolf pack prowling open water of reservoirs in a constant hunt for schools of threadfin shad or similar small forage fish and depend upon that massed force to effectively prey upon the smaller fish. White bass live their lives shoulder to shoulder with their scores of kin.
That pack behavior applies to their annual spawning ritual during January or February in which schools of white bass abandon their open-water haunts and move into the rivers that feed the lakes, relentlessly heading upstream where they stage while waiting, sometimes for weeks, for the right weather condition - water temperature of 55-60 degrees, slow-moving current, maybe a full moon - before getting on to the business of creating the side by side generation.
Where the fish congregate over the course of the extended spawning run, which began in the past couple of weeks, peaks during March and continues into April, is influenced by several factors.
"It depends on a lot of things," Gallenbach said of the places where schools of white bass are almost likely to concentrate. "Water level. The amount of electric current. What stage of the spawn they're in. Water clarity."
This time of year, early in the run when fish are moving up waterways and staging ahead of the bodily spawn, white bass in rivers where menses is normal or almost normal for the flavour and not inundation its banks, tend to congregate in relatively small areas belongings deep h2o with piffling or no current. Deep pools immediately downstream from shallow shoals, deep eddies behind sandbars and stretches of river where steep banks indicate deep water are prime spots to plumb with a Road Runner jig, Roostertail in-line spinner, shad-size crankbait or a live minnow.
Pay attention to "seams" in these eddies and holes, areas where current and slack water run across, Gallenbach advised.
"A lot of the time, they'll be correct where the electric current and the calm water encounter," she said.
Similarly, expect for areas with distinct water clarity changes, such as where clear h2o from a feeder creek flows into the almost always murkier h2o of the primary river channel.
"The fish will get right there on the border of that color alter," Gallenbach said. "They like that java-color water, for some reason."
Feeder creeks often tin can be the identify white bass congregate in huge numbers. Feeder creeks most oftentimes are best when h2o in the main river channel is high and muddy/sandy later on rising from a heavy rain. The feeder creeks oftentimes articulate long before the main river, and whites will alluvion out of the sandy water into the clear creeks, packing into deep pools, in bends in the creek or in eddies behind sand confined.
But clear water in a feeder creek is not a guarantee information technology will hold swarms of white bass.
"There has to be some current in the creek for the fish to get in in that location," Gallenbach said. "It doesn't have to be a lot of current. But if there's no current, they won't go up information technology, even if its clear and the river's muddy."
Past is no guarantee
Also, she said, anglers should non depend on finding concentrations of white bass in the same stretch of river where they constitute them in previous years.
"Rivers change. We get floods and loftier water similar we got this past year, and it changes so much you wouldn't recognize it," she said.
Deep holes fill up with sand and silt. Sand bars expand and contract. Eddies announced and disappear. Channels shift. And with that comes changes in where the fish concentrate.
"Just because you caught fish at a spot final year, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll exist at that place this year," Gallenbach said. "And even if they are in a spot today, that doesn't hateful they'll be there tomorrow. Rivers change every 24-hour interval. You tin't bet on the fish staying in one spot."
There is an exception to that dominion.
If river levels are low enough that man-made or natural barriers block or considerably restrict upstream migration of white bass, picking where to fish is dirt uncomplicated; the h2o downstream from the barriers will exist stacked with fish. Places such as the Lock and Dam on the Trinity River in a higher place Lake Livingston, the shoals on Bedias Creek that feed the Trinity River south of the Lock and Dam, Blackness (Coal) Shoals on the Sabine nearly Carthage, and a series of rocky shoals and shelves on the Colorado River upstream from Lake Buchanan are white-bass hot spots during years when river levels are low plenty to block the fish from further upstream migration.
While deep, calm runs and pools, eddies behind sand bars and clear-flowing feeder creeks are the best places to prospect for white bass during Feb and into March, that changes as the fish shift from pre-spawn staging to actively spawning.
White bass are "gratuitous spawners," meaning they don't build nests similar largemouth bass, sunfish, catfish and many other freshwater fish. Instead, female person white bass, trailed by groups of smaller male white bass, movement out of deep h2o and into relatively shallow (ii-half dozen anxiety) of water over areas holding sandy or gravel lesser and swept past slight electric current. There, the female releases hundreds of thousands of eggs that are fertilized by milt simultaneously released by circling males.
Spawn changes dynamic
This move to active spawning shifts fishing focus from the deep pools and holes and other staging areas to sandbars and sloping banks where the bottom holds sand or gravel. In much of Texas, specially the white-bass fisheries in the Trinity, Sabine, Neches, San Jacinto and Colorado river systems, that happens in late March and into Apr.
"The big spawning push is always around the full moon in March," Gallenbach said.
Until and then, anglers should concentrate on the early-flavour staging areas, especially deep pools and eddies and "active" feeder creeks. And don't waste material likewise much time in even the best-looking spot if it doesn't produce fish well-nigh immediately. If a spot is belongings a concentration of white bass, it won't take long to know information technology. And if non, move to another spot.
"If everybody makes 10 or xx casts and nobody's caught a fish, it's probably time to recollect most moving," Gallenbach said. "Sometimes, though, if I but know fish are there, or should be there, I'll stay a petty longer. Schools tin motility in and the fish plough on."
But usually, she said, if the spot holds white bass, the action is almost immediate and steady. How immediate and steady? Fri forenoon, Gallenbach's three clients - 2 adults and a youngster - landed their limit of 75 white bass in 90 minutes of angling.
"Nosotros were in the correct spot," she said.
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