Downrigging 101 — 60 Fish, Belton Lake Fishing Guide Report, 08 Oct. 2012






This morning I fished with Zacch S. and his fishing buddy, Ben. A little nip was in the 48F pre-dawn air following a cold front’s passage this past weekend.



Zacch came up with a rarity today — twin smallmouth bass taken on our tandem rig from off a rocky face in around 31 feet of water.


Zacch and Ben hold four of the white bass we caught today — all average for Belton Lake this year.

Zacch contacted me about a month ago to set up this trip and was very specific about his goals. He wanted to learn the fundamentals of downrigging so he could travel and fish some of the Texas freshwater striped bass fisheries (Texoma, Whitney, etc.) and head to the coast and use downriggers offshore.

We put a solid 3 hours in on the downriggers in order to cover and review all the basics of setting the ‘riggers correctly, maintaining contact with the balls on sonar, avoiding twists of the fishing line around the cable, trolling speed adjustments, and more. For our efforts, we boated a total of 24 fish during that time from Areas 133-1129 (early) and from Areas 181-1023 (mid-morning).

Although today’s weather (post-frontal but still breezy) wasn’t perfect, I hesitated to put this trip off any later in the year because our thermocline is rapidly breaking down with cooling surface waters beginning to sink and displace the once-heavier water beneath.

At Area 1023, we pulled up the riggers and did some casting with blade baits and jigging with slabs in order to give Zacch and Ben an idea of what needs to be done to capitalize on larger concentrations of fish once they are found via downrigging. This area held lost of smallish fish and these fish were reluctant to chase, so, we gambled — we left fish to find fish (with their permission, as we could have gone right on catching small fish) in hopes of finding some better quality fish elsewhere.

As it turns out, the gamble paid off (warning: it doesn’t always!!). We headed to Area 714, took a few serpentine passes over the area while studying sonar, found fish tightly bunched on bottom, got our slabs down to them, and, over the next hour, put another 36 fish in the boat — all white bass including 1, 2, and 3 year old fish up to 12″.

As noon came and went, the skies were brightening, the winds were calming, and the bite here slowly died to zero. We decided to call it a day with mission accomplished on “Downrigging 101”. For our efforts today we boated 2 smallmouth bass and 58 white bass – strangely enough, not a single hybrid (keeper or short) was boated today.

TALLY = 60 fish, all caught and released

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TODAY’S CONDITIONS:

Start Time: 7:00a

End Time:12:15p

Air Temp: 48F at trip’s start.

Water Surface Temp: 76.6F

Wind: NNW7-9.

Skies: Skies were greyed over with cloud cover until around 30 minutes post-sunrise, then cleared toward a post-frontal blue.