Topwater Went Wild — 178 Fish, Belton Fishing Guide Report, 06 August 2012






This morning I fished with returning guest Nate H. and his fishing buddy, Sean. Both men are combat veterans stationed at Ft. Hood; Nate serves in the Signal Corps and Sean in Transportation Corps.


Sean tagged this double on a tandem rig set up with doctored Pet Spoons as we downrigged after the topwater bite died.




Nate holds the largest of the hybrid we took on topwater this morning.


Nate has really come a long way as a fisherman since I first went out with him in February of 2011. I attribute this to several things: 1) he is eager to learn, 2) he is willing to listen, 3) he asks the right questions (for instance: “Why did you look for fish here?” and NOT “What lure did you use?”), and 4) he puts in the time on the water and has gained a lot of experience as a result of it.

Much of his focus has been on largemouth bass, even giving club tournament fishing a try. Today, his focus was on expanding his horizons to be able to target white bass and hybrid striped bass.

As we got underway, a gentle south breeze began to ripple the surface making things just right for topwater action to occur — and occur it did!! From 6:40am to 8:45am we experienced a very strong topwater bite with fish present on the surface the entire time. As we boated fish we noticed most fish were gorging themselves on young of the year shad only ~1 1/8″ long. Other fishermen who approached and used traditional baits did not catch near the quantities we did as their large offerings often got ignored. We used a “Cork Rig” to present our “match the hatch” baits and did very well. In two hours’ time we put exactly 143 fish in the boat including a 70/30% mix of white bass and hybrid striped bass. Every white bass we caught was of legal size, with some going as long as 12.75″. All but 1 of the hybrid were short, with most going 14 1/2″. We experienced this action in the vicinity of Area 010/812 .

After the topwater died and the few boats in the area with us departed, we used a “lift-drop” technique with TNT180 slabs in silver/white to continue to boat fish that were settling towards bottom at the conclusion of the heavy topwater feed. We added 9 more fish to our count employing this technique before the action died here once and for all.

Now the real work began … finding concentrations of still-active fish using sonar. We hit a bit of a down time from 9:00 to 9:30, then sighted a pod of white bass feeding on bait over open water near Area 1084. We pulled up into these fish and broke out the Cork Rigs once again and put another 11 fish in the boat here, taking our tally up to 164. As this action waned, a tip from a fellow fisherman led us to some sub-surface hybrid action in the vicinity of Area 1119.

At this location, we graphed loosely schooled hybrid down between 22-30 feet over a deeper bottom. We put live baits down and immediately had 3 fish on, and landed 2 of them. We noted that the first two fish boated on bait were larger than any of the 164 fish we’d taken up to that point, primarily on topwater; this is a very typical scenario — big fish just don’t spend much time swimming hard in pursuit of small, fast bait.

We closed out the trip searching with downriggers and exploiting what we found using both slabs in a lift-drop scenario and concentrating our downrigger pattern over top of previously located fish in the vicinity of Area 1106/1118. This accounted for our last “run” of 12 fish including a few just legal hybrid, a few short hybrid, a few white bass and 1 small largemouth.

By 11:45 things were slowing down so we called it a day and headed on back in. For their time spent on the water Nate and Sean got to experience one of the best days of topwater action this year, as well as the methodologies we employed after the fish slowed down and we were forced to “go looking”.


TALLY = 178 FISH, all caught and released

back to home page

TODAY’S CONDITIONS:

Start Time: 6:20a

End Time: 11:45a

Air Temp: 76F at trip’s start.

Water Surface Temp: 85.7F

Wind: S3-5.

Skies: Skies were fair and cloudless.