“When they really start to get active, as water temperatures broach 50°F just before the spawn, the action is faster,” Dollahon says. “The bite is still concentrated in 6 to 12 feet of water, but now I might use a shallow-running crank, like a #5 Rapala Shad Rap. It’s a great spring bait because it resembles a shad, you can move it fast, take the most active fish, and cover ground. The rivers hold thousands and thousands of fish at this point, and just plucking the most active ones can still result in 100-fish days. When that’s going on, you can fish almost the entire river, but a protected eddy is always a good place to start.

“Down here, a 3-pound white bass is considered a good fish,” he continues. “A 5-pounder is pretty rare. Tenkiller, Grand Lake, Fort Gibson, Lake Eufala, and Lake Hudson are the best white bass lakes in Oklahoma, as a general rule. You want the water running and you have to call the dams for release schedules (which every guide knows). A good day on those lakes, during the heat of the run, is 100 to 200 fish per boat per day, with bass averaging 1.5 pounds or more.”

The Kansas Run

Just one state north the run starts a week or two later, but location is much the same. In-Fisherman Field Editor Ned Kehde, who has a soft spot for whites, also starts hunting them during winter, when conditions allow. “We’ve found white bass concentrated in several deep holes in the rivers above several of our northeastern Kansas reservoirs as early as March 2,” he says. “When all is well in the piscatorial world, we can catch 101 in about three hours. That’s our magic number, our goal, from late winter into early spring.

“These holes are 10 to 15 feet deep. Some say that white bass concentrated in these holes in March and early April are staging, but we don’t have any evidence to support that notion. In other words, the white bass are merely there, and we catch them, but we don’t know what their motivations are for being there. It could be that these areas have the best invertebrate populations, which the white bass forage upon heavily in March and April.

“We cast 1/16-ounce jigs with 2- or 3-inch action-tail grubs in white or chartreuse to the shoreline and slowly swim them back to the boat,” Kehde says. “Red jigs generally produce best. We also use a 1/16-ounce silver-gray jig that consists of a chrome head, silver tinsel body, and silver-gray marabou tail. White-blue-white is another good combo in Kansas. I mention it only because color can sometimes be critical with white bass.

“Normally, they move out of these holes to their river spawning areas in mid-April, sometimes a little earlier or later. Spawning usually peaks when the water temperatures reach the upper 50°F range, but often continues until the water is slightly over 60°F. I still don’t know if moon phases affect the spawn.

“In three of the reservoirs closest to me, we think a lot of the white bass reside in primary feeder rivers year-round,” he says. “But for the past five years the white bass population (at least our catches of white bass) in these rivers has been down. Consequently, our prespawn and postspawn fishing in the rivers hasn’t been as good as it was in 2000, and we can’t make our goal of catching and releasing 101 white bass in three hours.” (We think that Kansas needs to place a 5-fish limit on white bass but, the fisheries folks think that’s a cockeyed idea.)