A Ban On Downriggers at Belton Lake!! — 87 Fish — 23 June 2011






I got a call from Mike S. a few days back and I could tell right away that he’d been bitten bad by the fishing bug. Mike’s a soon-to-retire computer guy, and his dad, Corbin, is a Houston-area insurance guy. Both were good company and we had a great trip this morning.

Mike S. (R) with the beefiest of the dozens of white bass we caught today, and proud papa Corbin (L) with our largest hybrid of the trip, a 4.00 pound fish, which fell for a crankbait.

As we talked about summertime fishing in general and fishing on Belton and Stillhouse specifically, I could tell he was genuinely interested in every little detail he could glean from our conversation — my kind of guy!! We put today’s trip on the calendar, and then he dropped the bomb — a request that we NOT fish with downriggers as he said he just couldn’t stand trolling. I had to stop and think a bit what I’d do for summertime fishing without my downriggers, as they are typically an integral part of any summer trip once the low-light period of sunrise is past.

Fortunately, summertime topwater is getting underway, so, I felt confident that we’d certainly put some fish in the boat in the early morning, and we did. From around 6:10 to 7:30 we continuously had mixed schools of white bass and short hybrid working schools of shad on the surface. We used cork rigs to account for 42 fish the “easy way”.

When the topwater died (which it did pretty quickly due to near cloudless skies), the work began.

We spotted scattered, small schools of whites and small hybrid in several areas, but not in concentrations leading me to believe that spending time chasing them would be productive.

We had about a 90 minute quiet spell where we did a lot of looking with sonar and not a lot of finding.

Finally, we located fish in the vicinity of Areas 830/831. As we got settled in and ready to fish, we began to see light topwater feeding, some suspended fish on sonar, as well as a lot of bottom-oriented fish, all in 20-30 feet of water in this area’s undulating terrain. We stayed on top of these fish from 9:15a to 10:45a, boating 39 fish here using a combination of techniques including lift-dropping with bladebaits, blasters, slabs and Sassys, and using slabs in a “smoking” retrieve. With the exception of an odd blue cat, all of these fish were short hybrid and white bass of mixed sizes up to 13 inches. We saw a classic “bell curve” feed here, gently tapering to near zero by 10:45.

Once the fish were all but done, I suggested the fellows grab some snacks and drinks for just a few minutes while I set up downriggers (with their permission, now that we’d had great success without the aid of downriggers!) and at least allow me to show them how to properly rig and run them in conjunction with sonar. During our brief 20 minute OJT session between Areas 472 and 678, we picked up our final 6 fish of the trip, including 3 largemouth bass, 1 white bass, 1 short hybrid, and one nice 4.00 pound hybrid — an eleventh hour “icing on the cake”.

TALLY = 87 FISH, all caught and released

TODAY’S CONDITIONS:

Start Time: 6:00a

End Time: 11:30a

Air Temp: 73F at trip’s start.

Water Surface Temp: ~82.4F

Wind: Winds were at S3 by sunrise and staying light and variable from 2-6SW for the remainder of the trip.

Skies: Skies were fair, dry, and bright with 20% clouds.








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