Fished a half-day morning trip today with father and son Jim and Preston B. of Temple. Young Preston is really into fishing and his dad is trying to keep up with him. Jim wanted to learn some approaches to catching fish that the family could then duplicate in their own boat on area lakes.
Preston holds the largest of our white bass today measuring 15 3/8 inches which will earn him a TP&WD Big Fish Award
An 11th hour surprise — as we were about to wrap up the trip, this nice channel cat tore into Preston’s Lunker Licker!
Start Time: 6:45a
End Time: 1:00pm
Air Temp: 75F at trip’s start.
Water Surface Temp: ~84.4 to 85.5F
Wind: Winds were SW all day; very light until around 8:45, then slowly tapering up to ~13, then slacking off to a sustained 10-11mph.
Skies: Skies were fair all day.
We started off looking for topwater in the vicinity of Area 061 and to the S. over deeper water. I wasn’t too hopeful about the prospects as the winds were very light. We found several pods of fish very briefly feeding and they were scattered all over the surface. The fellows did pretty well getting accurate casts out and correctly retrieving, but the fish really weren’t schooled tightly enough nor were they all that aggressive. We zero’ed on top this morning, but the technique of sighting and casting to surface feeding fish was understood, so we moved on to “Lesson 2”.
For this, we headed to Area 203 and used a bream pole and slip float to target sunfish. We got 1 very quickly and missed a few more. Again, the intent was to show the pair different things they could do to catch fish themselves. We didn’t spend much more time at this as the wind began to increase, and I knew we needed to look deep at that point for some white bass action starting to ramp up.
We headed directly for the span from Area 056 to Area 176 and I showed the fellows the basics of downrigging. We immediately got into fish and caught a total of 18 fish here including whites ranging from juvenile to 11.25 inches, as well as a single drum. Jim commented that he just didn’t see them attaching a downrigger to their own boat, so I quickly tried to think through what other approaches we might take as downrigging has been my bread-and-butter tactic this summer and the morning was still early. We went to Area 444 and briefly ran the riggers once more and picked up 2 more white bass from 11-12 inches before I suggested that we might attempt to catch a few more sunfish and then fish downlines with a drift sock using the sunfish as bait. Preston liked the idea, so, off we went to capture 11 more sunfish at Area 239.
That (enjoyable) chore finished, we put downlines in at Area 222 and drifted to the NE on the SW breeze. We immediately got a 3″ sunfish hit by our largest white bass of the trip, a 15 3/8 incher. After another drift here, and another parallel to the shoreline from Area 476 to the NE we came up with nothing but a few hits. By now we’d normally be wrapping the trip up, but I hated to end on a slow note, so, I suggested we could put the riggers down again and stir things up for one last go at them. Long story short, down went the riggers at the span from Area 444 to Area 206 and up came 21 more fish in about 35 minutes, including our largest fish of the trip, a nice channel cat that dined on our large Lunker Licker. At that, we headed back to the dock.
TALLY = 51 FISH, all caught and released
Bob Maindelle, Owner, Holding The Line Guide Service and Kids Fish, Too! Stillhouse Hollow Fishing Guide, Belton Lake Fishing Guide, Lake Georgetown Fishing Guide, Walter E. Long (Decker) Lake Fishing Guide. Offering Salado Fishing, Killeen Fishing and Ft. Hood Fishing