Fifty years ago, Floyd Clearman was cleaning a 25-fish limit of white bass and noticed his redbud tree was blooming. He began telling people that indicated the peak of the white bass run. I read last week that someone else wrote that that was THE TIME to fish for whites. Floyd Clearman may have coined that phrase. He was a masterful angler. (Photo by John Jefferson)

by John Jefferson

Lake Travis and the Pedernales River are a little calmer, today, in honor of a great man.

Floyd Clearman died on February 12. He was 93 –a testament to clean living.

He wasn’t a famous sports star, nor an elected official. But most people he knew or worked with respected him as a friend.

Career-wise, he was in banking – starting at an entry-level position. He retired as a senior vice president of Austin National Bank. His obituary said he was a Golden Gloves boxing champ, but I can’t imagine him wanting to hit people. He was just so thoughtful and respectful of his fellow man.

His greatness came from trying to live like Jesus — including being a renown fisherman. If I were a betting man, I’d wager the only law he ever broke was the twenty-five fish bag limit on white bass. He caught them for his church’s fish fry and didn’t keep count of his catch. He furnished the fish, and helped cook them for the church. He did it for years.

Russell Tinsley, a fellow outdoor writer, invited me to fish with Clearman and him one spring. Floyd told me the key to catching “whites” was to use four or six-pound-test line baited with 1/16 or 1/32-ounce jigs with chartreuse or white squirrel or deer tail hair trailers. Reread that sentence again. That’s all you need to know.

We met at his house and loaded into his boat. He apologized for the weather, preferring cloudy skies. But the sun was bright. We motored up the Pedernales River from Floyd’s house and went almost to the low water bridge near the Reimer’s Ranch – several miles upriver from the Highway 71 bridge.

We anchored near a deep hole in the river. It took a few minutes to determine the water’s depth without a depth finder. We’d let the line free fall until it hit bottom, then turned the reel handle a couple of turns to get the jigs off the bottom. White bass congregate in deep holes during daylight hours, then move up into shallower, swifter water at sundown to spawn.

It took a few minutes before Floyd caught his first white bass. Tinsley and I were a little slower. I asked whether he knew them by name as fast as he was catching them! If he didn’t hook a fish as the jig fell through the water column, he’d move his rod tip a little sidewise or up and down.

There were several other boats nearby. I heard them commenting on our catches. Two of them moved a little closer, keeping a courteous distance away … until we left.

Floyd became my white bass mentor on the Pedernales and Lake Travis for forty years. He once told me he had caught a five-pound white – two pounds over the state record! I asked if he had entered it as a record. He replied that they ate it, coining the phrase, “From the lake to the plate!’

I miss him.

JJ