This evening I fished on Belton Lake with fishing buddies Robert S. and John S., both currently stationed at Ft. Hood serving with the 36th Engineer Battalion.
The fishing really turned on near sunset with some great subsurface action prior to sunset and moderate topwater schooling action thereafter. We didn’t want to stop catching them long enough for a photo before it got too dark!!
Robert and John have read this blog for a long time and have just shaken their heads at the quantity of fish my clients catch in the summer months while the two of them often struggled to put single digits in the boat on their hard-earned weekends.
So, they called me up and asked for a lesson on downrigging, and specified Belton as that is where they like to fish. We had everything set for Saturday, Sept. 8th until the weatherman spoke his piece. Cold front … 25 mph winds sustained … gusts over 30mph. I made a quick phone call to John and Robert to find out if their schedule would allow us to bump up a few hours to fish in advance of the front on this Friday night; and it did!
As we got going, I covered some basics about summer time fishing … about the thermocline, about horizontal motion, about feeding windows occurring early and late in low light conditions, about matching forage size, and more. I urged them to be patient as the trip unfolded, as we typically catch as many or more fish in the last hour of a summer evening trip than we do in the first several hours of the trip, combined.
So it was tonight. We downrigged successfully for what we found to be very lethargic fish. We found that the 28′ mark was the key depth tonight, just a few feet above the top of the thermocline. For our efforts primarily in and around Area 685/905 and Area 478, we boated 16 fish up until 7:05 PM, including white bass, channel and blue catfish, and drum (no hybrids, not even short ones, strangely enough). Both Pet Spoons and the White Willow performed equally well tonight used on tandem rigs.
At 7:05, we ran sonar slowly over Area 814/1129 and found a heavy school of white bass just “waking up” and going on their pre-dusk feed, lifting off bottom in pursuit of shad. We e-anchored over these fish and worked them over with 3/4 oz. TNT180 slabs, moving just a few yards whenever sonar indicated the fish had moved out from beneath us. We kept up with this school down beneath us for about 20 minutes and in that short time boated an additional 29 fish very quick in this manner.
As this tapered off the white bass began to force bait to the surface and, on the light SSE chop, we could begin to see “wolfpacks” of fish feeding on small shad in the vicinity of Area 1070/010. We broke out our rods rigged with Cork Rigs and wore the fish out as long as they remained on top, putting another 29 fish in the boat. All I could do was take fish off as John and Robert made short, accurate casts and kept the fish coming in the boat.
After everything died down, we slowly retrieved blade baits near bottom to comb out a few more still-active fish from the many inactive ones now settled back to bottom. We put a final two fish in the boat this way and called it a night with a tally of 77 fish boated. We caught 5 times more fish in the last hour of fishing than we had in the entire balance of our trip.
And now about that UFO (unidentified floating object). Well, it happened like this … as soon as it was pitch dark and the winds got really still, John, Robert and I spotted this eerie green glow to the northeast of us — about 100 yards away. Slowly, ever so slowly, we crept closer with our trolling motor down running as quietly as we could. Was it an alien craft downed in the water? Was it a Las Vegas-style casino being erected on Lake Belton? We still weren’t sure. Closer we crept … now just 20 yards away. The light was now near-blinding. I put my polarized glasses back on … at that moment a voiced boomed forth out of the light “Hey there, Bob!!”. Well shoot, this was no alien — it was Bill T., long time Belton angler with a new night fishing accessory affixed to his fishin’ rig. A picture is worth a thousand words …
Bill T.’s new night fishing light system. LED-based, 12-volt powered, and ~5 amp draw. Don’t laugh … those green lights attract fish, sure enough!! Sorry I mistook you for an alien, Bill. You really are a handsome guy.
TALLY = 77 FISH, all caught and released.
TODAY’S CONDITIONS:
Start Time:
End Time: 8:15p
Air Temp: 101F at trip’s start.
Water Surface Temp: 84.5F
Wind: SSE 5-8.
Skies: Skies were fair and cloudless.
This blog entry was authored by Bob Maindelle, owner of Holding the Line Guide Service, Belton Lake Fishing Guide and Stillhouse Hollow Fishing Guide.