Guadalupe Bass

The Guadalupe bass is the state fish of Texas and lives nowhere else. It is a small fish — a fourteen-incher is a good one — that holds in the current seams of Hill Country rivers and fights considerably harder than its size suggests.

Find them in the moving water. Guadalupe bass are more current-oriented than largemouth: they sit behind boulders, at the tail of a riffle, along the edge of a limestone ledge where fast water meets slow. Fish them the way you would fish a trout stream, casting upstream and across, letting the fly swing through the seam.

The Llano, the San Marcos, the Colorado above Austin, and the Guadalupe itself all hold good populations. Hybridization with introduced smallmouth has been a real problem, and Texas Parks and Wildlife has spent decades restocking pure-strain fish. Handle them gently and put them back.

Flies: small poppers, a size 8 woolly bugger, a Clouser in olive and white. A four- or five-weight is enough rod, and a shorter one is easier to use under the cypress.