Christmas cheer
’Tis the season to hook some big fish
Despite the intense cold we’re experiencing, Christmas week is a fantastic time to enjoy some of the year’s best fishing for hybrids and stripers in Arkansas.
Cold weather is uncomfortable for anglers, but it doesn’t dampen the voracious appetites of striped bass and striped bass/white bass hybrids. While I’m very fond of fishing for stripers in February and March, two of my best trips occurred during Christmas week on Lake Hamilton.
The first was in 2006 while fishing with E.P. Fletcher. It was cold and still that morning. A thick fog limited visibility to a few yards and creating a sensation of near vertigo. We motored to a wide area near the mouth of Hot Spring Creek with the intention of catching largemouth bass, but hybrids hijacked the agenda.
Over depths of about 40 feet, Fletcher’s graph showed big arches hovering around 20 feet. Frequently, a streak appeared on the graph, denoting a fish tearing into a school of baitfish. In that situation, the arches and streaks could be white bass, but they might also be hybrids. If you’re really lucky, they might be stripers. If you’re lottery lucky, they could be all three.
Fletcher clipped off his bass bait and tied on a 1-ounce spoon. I did the same. We cast them a short distance and let them fall to the bottom. We lifted our rod tip ups high and dropped them abruptly, causing the spoons to fall. All of our strikes came when the spoon fell.
We mostly caught hybrids weighing 3-5 pounds, an ideal weight for the medium duty tackle we used. But, as often happens on the Ouachita River lakes, the schoolyard bully crashed the party. A jolt shot through my rod handle as I dropped my rod tip. I set the hook. As the fish surged to the bottom, I loosened my drag to prevent my line from breaking. After a couple of minutes, I worked the fish toward the surface, but it tore off on a blistering run. The fish turned and went under the boat, but when I tried to turn him, my line sagged.
The spoon was still attached to the line, but all three prongs of the treble hook had been pulled straight. Only a big striper can do that.
As morning progressed, the hybrids quit biting, but white bass took their places. We caught a bunch until that bite ebbed, and we finished the morning catching Kentucky bass on spoons over deep brushpiles.
One of my most memorable trips occurred Dec. 23, 2015, while fishing with Ron Waymack and my daughter Amy on the upper portion of Lake Hamilton below Blakely Dam. We caught only two fish that day, but they were lifetime trophies for Amy and me.
It was still dark, and water surged from the hydropower generators at the dam just a few hundred yards upstream. Waymack briefly tutored Amy about how to cast and retrieve the rainbow trout imitator lure he tied on for her. He cast the lure into the darkness, clicked the reel into gear and handed the rod to Amy. He turned around to tend to another rod when Amy announced that she had hooked a fish.
“Nah,” Waymack said, chuckling. “A big old lure like that feels like a fish until you get used to it.”
“No, I really think I’ve got one,” Amy said with calm urgency. The words had no sooner left her mouth when a big fish lit the darkness with a veritable geyser of sparkling water. Amy expertly fought and landed a 12-pound striper, her biggest to date.
We believe that portended a striped bass meat haul, but it was not to be. A cold front swept rapidly into the area, plunging the temperature and the air pressure.
The best time to fish is at the peak of a low-pressure front when the humidity gets so thick that the air seems to merge with the water. The air and lake assume the same color, and it looks like you’re drifting in a cloud. As the sky darkened, the anticipation among the crew was palpable.
A distant peal of thunder seemed to open the rain bucket. As if someone flipped a switch, a big fish slammed the artificial lure in fairly shallow water at the same time another fish slammed a shad under a planer board. There was too much slack in the shad line, and that fish quickly broke off, but the fish on my line was solidly hooked. The first big surge was like opening the gate on a rodeo bull. I just hoped to make it to “eight.”
The fish immediately plowed toward the stern, which required me to bound off the casting deck into the hold. That is a tricky feat when you’ve got a weak knee and you’re wearing a rubber-sole duck boot on slick fiberglass. I negotiated the landing, danced over Waymack’s dog and crabwalked through the narrow passage between the console and the gunwale.
Waymack scrambled to reel in the live shad lines before the fish tore into them. He finessed one rod over my rod, and I followed the fish all the way around the boat.
Finally, the fish broke the surface, and the entire crew cheered.
As we slid the fish out of the net, Waymack said, “That’s one for the wall right there!” it would I long. made The At cost some $18-20 fish about was quick per 46 $800 calculations. inch, inches to mount. have to suffice. Photography I released would the fish in hopes of catching it again someday when it would be even bigger.
These memories torment me this week. It’s duck season, but there’s a lot of fun to be had under the water, too.