Bob Bledsoe

JULY
White Bass
Summertime surface action is great on many Oklahoma lakes where schools of white bass chase shad in open water. If you can find a spot where the sand bass are attacking shad, you can enjoy some fast action by throwing a variety of baits into the feeding area.

Finding them can be done in several ways. Some anglers troll with crankbaits or spinners, and then when they hook up with a good sand bass they either throw out a marker and cast around it or they troll back through the same area repeatedly. Some watch for splashing or for seagulls diving toward the water. Both can mark the spot where sand bass have shad pushed toward the surface. And you can also use sonar to find roaming schools of sand bass and shad.

Once you’ve found them, casting jigs, spinners, slab spoons, crankbaits or even topwater plugs into the feeding area can produce results. I like to tie three or four small jigs about a foot apart on my line and then toss the multi-jig rig into the schools to catch two or three fish at a time.

AUGUST
Striped Bass
Perhaps the best inland striper fishery in the nation is Lake Texoma. While it rarely produces the giant 40-pounders found at lakes in other states, it consistently churns out thousands and thousands of limit catches of stripers in the 5- to 15-pound range. The fishery keeps a hundred or more guides busy pretty much year ‘round, and that number swells in the summer.

The hardest part about catching stripers at Texoma is finding the fish. Stripers are usually open-water roamers and so can move about the lake from day to day. One can usually find active fish using sonar, but many anglers also just “follow the fleet,” watching for guides and good local anglers who have found fish already.

Live-baiting with fresh shad is typically the easiest way to catch stripers at this time of year here, but slab spoons, deep-diving crankbaits and jigs can also produce results. Sometimes you can entice stripers to the surface with topwater lures also.

SEPTEMBER
Largemouth Bass
Hugo Lake is one of Oklahoma’s best bass fisheries, and in late summer some of the best fishing action is in the Kiamichi River at the upper end of the lake. The winding river channel that stretches up toward Antlers has several creeks and sloughs where both spotted bass and largemouths tend to gather in August and September.

In 2007, lake levels were still so high in late summer that anglers could motor many miles farther than usual up the river. Typically, though, navigation isn’t possible too far above Rattan Landing. From Rattan Landing downstream to the lake, though, plastic worms and spinnerbaits are both good tools for probing the river bends and shoreline pockets for bass.