I had planned to fish all day on Saturday, August 1st, but the heat drove me off the lake at 4:20. Except for about an hour of wind up to about 10 mph, it was dead calm all day. Caught a 2-12 and a 3-10 on my first 2 casts, using a shad Yellow Magic Magnum. After an hour of no results except for a dink on a 4" worm, I finally tied on a "dirty white" River2Sea Spittin' Wa. That started it. Between that and a solid white Top Toad, I had frog explosions for the rest of the day. Except for 2 that hit the Yellow Magic and two that fell for 12" worms in 12 and 16 feet of water, all of my bass were caught on those two soft-body frogs. A couple just sucked in a motionless frog (usually while I was removing loose line), but most exploded on them. As is normal, I missed some big frog blowups, too. I also had a couple of good fish that fought me for at least 20 seconds on a wachy-rigged watermelon Senko, although they were never even hooked...finally just opened their mouths and were gone. Both of those were off the middle of the dam in about 9 feet of water. I ended up boating 26 bass - 19 over 14" and 7 'unders.' No really big fish, but one was right at 4 pounds and five were between 3 and 4 pounds. The water temperature ranged from 89.8 to 91.8 at trolling motor depth, and the visibility was 4' at best. I encountered very little vegetation - some short, very dark greyish-green hydrilla on the bottom in a couple of places, a very few lily pads, a tiny bit of filamentous algae, and thick mats of floating, tan or pale yellow gunk (sure hope it's not golden alga) almost everywhere around the entire shoreline of the lake. All of the frog bass hit right next to, but not in, those beige mats. I caught no huge fish, but still, it was a pretty successful day for a Texas August.

One more thing:  The red x on the image below shows the location of one of the wasp nests. It was about head-high to me as I was sitting in my pond boat. I tried to spray it with wasp spray, but the wind at that time was too strong and I didn't want to get any closer.

(STEVE: I did notice places, mostly in the west arm of the lake, where there were a lot of 3 cm and smaller bits of something the color of copper sulphate suspended [not floating] in the water. I'd never seen that before - not anywhere. Could it be indicative of a possible problem?)

Posted By: Tom Dillon