Few waterways are more closely associated with spoons and striped bass than Lake Texoma, which spreads across 89,000 acres along the Texas/Oklahoma border.
“It’s the old way to fish for them and all we used to do – and it still works,” said Chris Caldwell, who has been guiding on Lake Texoma for 42 years. Caldwell (580-564-7177) currently fishes primarily with live bait for guide parties, but a recent day with him on the big lake proved that the stripers still can’t resist a Bomber Slab Spoon, and we witnessed several other striper anglers using spoons and bringing stripers into the boat.
Because of the rich local history of Bomber Lures and the Slab Spoon, locals refer to spoon fishing on Lake Texoma as “slabbing,” no matter what kind of spoon they are fishing.
And while spoons get fished various ways, the most consistently effective approach, and what is most commonly dubbed slabbing, is to drop the spoon to the bottom or to just below a school of suspended stripers and burn back to the surface. No jerks. No pauses. Just reel quickly and hang on. Hang on tight, by the way, because strikes tend to be decisive!
“They’re down there chasing shad. Burning the spoon makes it look like a shad trying to get away, and that makes stripers attack,” Caldwell said.
Because this approach calls for positioning a boat directly over the fish, catching stripers begins with finding them, and there’s no easy answer to where they’ll be because stripers roam constantly during summer, following schools of open-water baitfish. Knowledge of areas the fish have been used, whether gained by days on the water or from tackle shop or marina reports, provides a solid starting point, but finding fish calls for searching with electronics and watching for visual signs.
Caldwell always watches for surface-schooling stripers this time of year. The schoolers on Texoma are almost never the size of fish Caldwell seeks for clients, but the “right fish” are commonly suspended below the schooling fish, and his graph reveals whether that is the case.
