One spring evening in late March my good buddy Rich Abdoler and I were out on the Arkansas end of Long Creek, on the south side of Tablerock Lake, fishing back up in a cove. There was ambience like you’ve never seen before, thick as honey on a slab of cold cornbread. The tree frogs were singing, and it was still and warm and a little creek gurgled and bubbled along, slowing into a nice pool at the upper end of that long cove.
It was shady and quiet, and we just tied up to a log and started casting across that pool, catching Kentucky bass about 14 or 15 inches long on topwater lures. We were relaxed, kicked back and enjoying ourselves, and then all of a sudden, it all changed. A four-pound female white bass came clashing up from the dark depths and savagely slurped my lure under. And then another engulfed Rich’s lure and then we quit relaxin’ and got serious. For an hour it was Katie-bar-the door. I never caught so many huge white bass in my life, and I never saw a light action rod bend so much in such a short period of time. We actually caught eight white bass that weighed a collective 35 lbs. We ruined the ambience in a hurry, with the franticness of quick casts, and flopping white bass on the boat floor, as we didn’t have time to string them. I was a little too poor back then to have a live well. Spent too much time fishing to make any money. White bass in the spring can keep a man about half broke, and that is perhaps one of the reasons you shouldn’t get hooked on them. But there are other reasons.
You catch white bass in the spring when they are spawning by finding tributaries to Ozark reservoirs where they go to spawn. It can start as early as late February and continue into May. That explains the when and where, but why you shouldn’t needs more detail.
You shouldn’t do it because that period of time may be the very best times of the year to catch a big string of slab crappie, and a good time to hook onto a bulging-bellied lunker bass. If you get to catching really big white bass, you will get addicted to it and you might miss the best spring walleye fishing you have ever seen, which starts just about he time white bass start showing up in lake tributaries. Or you might not have time to set a trotline and catch a flathead catfish that would weigh 50 lbs. If you are white bass fishing in the early spring, you may stay out there ’til dark some evening like Rich and I did, with your rod just bent nearly double and your spinning reel drag singing and your arms tired from the fight. Then you will get home well after dark and clean fish for an hour or so and get to bed so late that when it comes time to get up before dawn, so you can hunt turkeys, you’ll be too tired to do it. I don’t know how many times I have heard of someone sitting up against a tree in the first warm rays of the morning sun, and letting a big gobbler walk right by them because they were asleep after fishing late the night before.
Of course, I know folks who do not like to eat a white bass filet because they never learned how to skim off that red, oily outside layer of meat, to leave nothing but a white chunk of meat, and that’s what you have to do. Don’t leave any of that red meat on a filet. And then they taste as good as just about anything else, except maybe crappie, walleye bass, and catfish… and maybe bluegill.
When they run up the creeks and rivers with the first hints of spring, you can start out with small jigs and then progress to a little topwater minnow or a popper of some kind, anything you can raise a little disturbance with on top of the water. That’s when to catch them, and where, and how. But you’d be better off not getting started at it, or you may get addicted. In the spring, I’d druther catch those big old female whites in a current late in the evening than eat a whole bag of donuts at once. And that’s a mighty powerful addiction.
Larry Dablemont currently writes a weekly newspaper column for 35 newspapers, publishes the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal, has written seven books, all of which can be found at his Amazon store, where you can order signed copies. He and his wife reside in Bolivar, Missouri. You can read some of Larry’s current and older posts at his blog, Outdoors with Larry Dablemont, and visit his Lightnin’ Ridge Publications Facebook page.
