Belton Lake Fishing Guide Report – 08 May 2010 – 56 FISH






Fished a half-day morning trip with husband and wife Wally and Janet K. of Temple. This couple is new to the area, and, despite having some saltwater experience, some experience on northern waters, and some stream fishing experience from out West, they wanted me to give them an overview of how to fish Belton Lake since they’ve purchased a pontoon boat and have it in wetdock there.

In summary, we spent the morning teaching/learning 4 essential techniques: vertical jigging, fishing bladebaits, downrigging, and fishing live shad. While any one of these techniques and their nuiances could easily consume the entirety of a trip unto themselves, we just covered the basics in this 5 hours on the water.

Wally and Jan lip two of the fifty-six fish we tempted today despite a NE blow.


As we got underway, I started us off fairly shallow expecting that weekend boat traffic and a forecast shift in the winds to more easterly would make such fishing tougher as the morning went along. We first checked out Area 377 and found ample fish and bait present in about 24 feet of water on bottom. We got setup near these fish and I gave some fundamental instruction on vertical jigging. Once both had the rhythm down, I moved us up into the fish corresponding with the rising of the sun (mostly obscured due to cloud cover). The feed today followed a fairly short two-hour bell curve which began at sunrise and ended at around 9:15am. We began to pick up fish, including white bass, hybrid and largemouth, with regularity off bottom.

As the feeding increased, I began to see fish come up off the bottom and then explained to Wally and Jan how to use their slabs to catch these suspended fish by “smoking” both with and without the aid of sonar.

At this peak in activity, I also introduced the bladebait fishing technique, using both a countdown method for suspended fish as well as a lift-drop method for bottom huggers. As the feed began to shutdown, we again went back to slabbing off bottom.

When things looked like they were about to shut down, we pulled out the downriggers in an effort to get an appropriate bait in front of the very few still-active fish amongst the majority of turned-off fish. We downrigged for only about 20 minutes in the vicinity of Area 378, got 4 strikes missing the first two and landing the second two. Wally and Janet each completely rigged their own lines in these two successful efforts. With this method understood, Wally was ready for more learning.

Due to the decreasing fish activity level at this point (about 9:50), we went with live bait from this point on and only managed one more fish after stopping and testing the waters in 3 separate areas, all of which held fish as clearly shown on sonar. The wind was nearly due east at this point and the fishing had ground to a halt. We put bait down at Area 619, then at Area 377, and finally to the south of Area 171 and only there did we get any action, boating one 16″ hybrid and missing another, both on ~5″ gizzard shad.

By 11:30 we decided to call it a day. We took 56 fish today including 1 crappie, 2 largemouth, and a mix of 53 short hybrid and white bass in about a 1 to 5 ratio.

TALLY = 56 FISH, all caught and released








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