The story book fishing tales just keep on coming at Lake O.H. Ivie near San Angelo. Despite the blistering summer heat, the West Texas reservoir continues to kick out giant bass to shock the imagination.
Fishing guide Josh Jones recently reported back-to-back days with five fish bags weighing upwards of 50 pounds.
On Aug. 30, Jones and his client, Larry Walker of Irving, landed 16 bass. Their heaviest five weighed 51.54 pounds — a 10.3 pound average. The anglers boated 12 bass over eight pounds and two over 10 pounds — all on 9.5 Divine Shaky Worms.
It’s hard to imagine the bite getting any stronger, but it did.
Jones and Walker boated five bass totaling 52.82 pounds on the following day. Jones says Walker landed five fish weighing about 50 pounds himself, including a pair of 12 pounders. Together the anglers caught 25 fish over eight pounds in two days, Jones said.
The recent big bass flurry is par for the course.
Lake O.H. Ivie has been kicking out 10-plus-pounders like a gumball machine since 2021. Jones has had a really hot hand at catching them.
The guide claims his boat has accounted for 84 double digit bass this year alone. He calls it “a personal accomplishment I doubt I will ever duplicate.”
Don’t bet on it. Jones is the undisputed big bass champ of Texas. He is a crackerjack, sniffing out big bass far from shore with forward-facing sonar.
Last December, Jones claimed he caught 31 O.H. Ivie bass between eight and 13 pounds in a single day. The heaviest five weighed 61.37 pounds on digital scales. He called it the heaviest five-fish catch from a public lake ever recorded cast-to-catch on video.
In 2022, he became the first angler in the 37-year history of the Toyota Share-Lunker program to catch four Toyota ShareLunker Legacy Lunkers.
Amazingly, it only took him six months to pull it off. Fish must weigh 13 pounds or more and be caught between Jan. 1 and March 31 to qualify as Toyota Legacy Lunkers.
TEAL SEASON UNDERWAY
Texas’ early teal season got underway 30 minutes before sunrise on Sept. 9. The season runs for 16 consecutive days through Sept. 24.
Teal — blue-winged, green-winged and cinnamon — are migratory birds. Blue-winged teal are the most abundant.
Teal are always the first ducks to push south in an annual migration that leads many towards Mexico, Central and South America. Thousands pass through Texas along the way, usually beginning in late August and early September.
How long they stick around hinges largely on the abundance of goodies they find to eat upon arrival.
Teal are dabblers. They feed primarily in skinny water ripe with new growth, new growth vegetation and seeds they can easily reach.
Texas teal hunting seasons vary in quality from one year to the next. Kevin Kraai isn’t looking for this one to be anything special.
Kraai is the waterfowl program leader for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. He says the lingering drought gripping most of the state is the main reason for the unfavorable forecast.
“Habitat conditions across much of the state of Texas are currently very poor,” he said. “Record heat and lack of precipitation has resulted in very little fresh shallow water on the landscape.”
There are some bright spots in the Texas Panhandle and in deep South Texas. Kraai said portions of the Texas Panhandle received record rainfall earlier this summer.
“Many playa basins are still holding water going into teal season,” he said. “Birds should find this area of the state very favorable.”
Down south, hunters along the lower coast could see some decent shoots thanks to some much-needed rainfall from the recent tropical storm.
“The timing couldn’t be better for this area in advance to the pending teal migration,” Kraai said.