You'd have had to call it lovely. It was a warm day in April -- one of those sunny afternoons when all the world seems happy to be alive. A pair of red-tailed hawks soared across the skies in their mating flight. Bluebonnets, Indian blankets, and winecups painted the pastures in the brilliant hues of Central Texas spring. Mockingbirds and canyon wrens filled the air with birdsong -- natural music to accompany the melodic liquid gurgles of the flowing Colorado River.

But if you looked close, you'd have seen two guys who weren't paying much attention to the charms of Mother Nature. Under different circumstances, fishing buddy Thomas Keller and I might have sat in the shade, dangled our feet in the current, and admired the natural beauty. But this afternoon our attention was directed somewhere else. We were concentrating. Focused. Centered. Honed in, with all our senses, on a certain school of fish. They were on one side of the river and we were on the other. In between was a deep hole filled with slippery rocks. We waded out as far as we felt was safe and began casting small feather jigs upstream so they would drift down with the current. About every other cast, our light spinning rods bent double with the determined pull of a scrappy white bass (AKA sand bass or sandies).

It was the white bass run that put this area on the map. Colorado Bend State Park sits on some of the finest springtime fishing in the world. It's the headwaters of Lake Buchanan and the spawning ground of thousands of sand bass. Old timers will tell you it was even better back before 1977, the year striped bass were introduced. The lake supports massive schools of gizzard and threadfin shad -- baitfish which then provided groceries for sandies in schools so large you could measure them in acres. Nowadays the mighty striped bass sits atop the Buchanan food chain, and most anglers agree that the spring white bass run is not what it once was. Still -- fishing at Col ...

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