Lake Conroe ‘frustrating’ for pro anglers
The 52 professional anglers from 21 states who competed in the 2017 Bassmaster Classic, held March 24-26 on Lake Conroe, discovered some things local anglers have long known concerning the fishery in the 21,000acre reservoir on the San Jacinto River in Montgomery and Walker counties.
Conroe holds a healthy, highquality bass fishery that includes a higher-thanusual percentage of largemouths weighing 3 pounds or more and the very real potential that the next cast can produce a double-digit fish. But those fish can be maddeningly uncooperative.
“Frustrating” was the most common reply when competitors were asked to describe their experience with Conroe largemouths.
“It was tougher than I expected,” competitor Brent Ehrler said during a news conference after the final weigh-in Sunday evening at Minute Maid Park.
And he expected it to be tough.
“(Conroe) is notorious for not being a place where you’ll catch a lot of fish,” Ehrler said.
That says a lot, considering Ehrler finished third in the contest billed as the world championship of professional bass fishing, after the Californian led the field through its first two days. Ehrler was one of only four anglers who managed to land a five fish daily limit of largemouths each of the tournament’s three days.
‘Tough tournament’
Jordan Lee, the 25-yearold Alabama angler who won the 47th edition of the tournament, rocketed out of 15th place on the last day — after climbing from a modest 37th place at the end of the first day— by landing his only five-fish limit of the contest on the final day. It was a heck of a bunch of fish, totaling 27 pounds, 4 ounces — the heaviest one-day stringer of the contest.
But even Lee, who walked away with the tournament’s $300,000 first-place prize and the world-champion cachet that will bring much more in sponsorships and endorsements, wasn’t impressed with the fishing on Conroe. He managed to weigh only 12 bass over the three days, and he landed a total of eight fish on that final day.
“It was a really tough tournament,” Lee said. “I’d told a friend of mine that, even if I won the Bassmaster Classic, I’d tell everyone this lake’s not that good. So, I’m saying it.”
But Conroe is a good lake for bass, if not always for bass fishing. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department fisheries surveys indicate the lake’s largemouth population is healthy, has a “moderately high” density and excellent trophy-bass potential, thanks to a high percentage of largemouth with Florida-bass genetics. Growth rates and body condition are excellent and reproduction and recruitment are “very good.”
Bass fishing success on Conroe, however, often doesn’t reflect that healthy fishery. As the Classic proved, it can be tough for even the most skilled anglers to catch more than a handful of largemouths during a day on the lake. Why? The most common reason/excuse is the tremendous amount of fishing pressure the nearly-urban reservoir sees. That heavy fishing pressure — some of the heaviest in the state — and the effect it has on fishes’ behavior was cited by many of the Bassmaster Classic competitors as a reason for the relatively modest catches.
But anglers did catch bass. And they caught them in just about every depth range, from very shallow to relatively deep, and on lures running the gamut from topwaters to bottom-bumpers — something anglers targeting Conroe over the next few weeks should keep in mind. Conroe’s bass population is scattered, with some fish in pre-spawn mode, some actively spawning in the shallows and others in post-spawn behavior, moving back toward deep water where many settle for the summer.
Angler Steve Kennedy, who finished second in the contest, fished shallow water (less than 5 feet), pitching jigs to willows and timber. His 14-bass total of 55 pounds, 1-ounce was just 1 pound, 9 ounces behind Lee. One more 16-inch Lake Conroe largemouth, most of which weigh around 2 pounds, and Kennedy would have won.
High-profile professional angler Michael Iaconelli, who finished sixth, said he caught most of his fish from relatively deep water — 8-12 feet — fishing a Carolina-rig lizard and a “shaky head” worm.
Kevin VanDam, an iconic professional angler who has qualified for 26 Bassmaster Classics, fished rock rip-rap and bulkheads on the southern half of the lake, throwing a jerkbait that imitated the clouds of shad that have moved near those structures. He finished 10th.
Hard-spot success
Conroe anglers — all anglers, not just those targeting largemouth — should note Van Dam’s tactic. Threadfin shad have moved into shallows, especially along shorelines lined with wooden bulkheads or piers, where they spawn, their eggs attached to “hard’ surfaces such as wood or rock. That mass movement of threadfins is followed by hungry predator fish, and not just largemouth bass. VanDam said he caught several catfish, white bass/striped bass hybrids and even crappie while fishing around bulkheads and docks. Some of the best rod-and-reel catfishing of the year occurs on Conroe when shad move to the bulkheads. Usually, that doesn’t happen until April or May. But with this years’s mild winter and early spring, the shad spawn, and the good fishing that comes with it, appears ahead of schedule.
Other Classic competitors found their fish in very shallow water — less than 4 feet and often in just a couple of feet. These were spawning bass, including some true heavyweight females. Most were targeted with soft-plastics or jig/craw combinations. But some of the big fish, including the second heaviest taken in the contest, hit topwater lures.
Angler Ott DeFoe, who finished fifth, used a prototype of a new topwater plug to catch a 9-pound, 9-ounce behemoth on the contest’s final day. DeFoe said he took the fish while working a Storm Arashi Cover Pop, a chuggerstyle topwater not yet on the market. DeFoe, like many anglers, fished the upper reaches of the lake that, unlike the heavily developed southern half of the lake, holds vegetated shoreline. Several of the competitors targeted spawning bass in the lake’s upper reaches.
Lee’s winning catch came from mid-depth water. He found a concentration of post-spawn fish holding around a “hard spot” on a point at the mouth of a cove. The area, about the size of a room, he said, was in about 5-6 feet of water. He used a Strike King 5XD crankbait (citrus shad pattern), “shaky head” worm (8-inch Bullworm) and a half-ounce jig with a softplastic craw to take his fish. His 12 fish averaged more than 4.5 pounds.
Everything under 10
No double-digit largemouths were landed. But fish weighing more than 9 pounds were taken each day. The heaviest was a 9-pound, 12-ounce fish Ehrler landed on the tournament’s first day. A 9-1, taken by angler Skylar Hamilton, was the heaviest taken on the second day, with DeFoe’s 9-9 caught on the final day of competition.
Over the three-day tournament, competitors hauled a total of 437 bass from Lake Conroe to the weigh-in stage in Minute Maid Park. Those largemouths weighed a total of 1,464 pounds — an average of about 3.35 pounds per bass.
Officials with BASS, the organization behind the Bassmaster Classic, reported all but five of those fish survived the experience. Tournament officials worked in cooperation with Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s inland fisheries division to care for the fish. TPWD provided staff, specially designed water tanks, trailers and vehicles used to transport those fish from Minute Maid Park after each day’s weigh-in, releasing the bass back into Lake Conroe, where they can continue confounding anglers.