This morning’s trip included 3 generations of fisherman: Grandpa Butch, his son-in-law, Aaron, and Butch’s grandsons, Ethan (12) and Owan (8).
Ethan kicked off the day with a double (two fish at the same time on one rod)!!
Owan gets by with a little (fish holding) help from his friend — Grandpa!!
As I arrived at lakeside well before sunrise this morning, I was glad to see a light breeze already blowing. Belton is notorious for giving up few fish in bright, calm conditions like we’ve encountered the past several days, so today looked much better than the past 2 or 3.
As we got on the water, there was not much of a low-light bite this morning. In fact, our first fish boated came after the sun had already risen.
Although some birds (gulls and terns) are now found at the lake, they were not feeding much, and, what fish they did feed over, we’d already found on our own. (Could it be they were following us for a change??) Anyway, just after sunrise, we could see the spray being blown up into the air by fish feeding lightly on topwater, so, we headed right to the action and got into fish for about 45 minutes. We found concentrations of fish with the downriggers and then hovered over top of the fish we’d found and slabbed for them. The best action came at between Areas 836 and 837. We boated 13 fish in very short order. Just when things were starting to heat up, a very thick blanket of fog moved over the lake, reduced the light to pre-dawn levels and killed the bite. We had little success over the next 90 minutes or so and until the fog completely cleared.
Although we picked up a fish here and there, we only encountered one other significant concentration of fish the rest of the morning, at Area 1141. Here, a breakline and an ample supply of shad held the fishes’ attention. We initially contacted the fish with the downriggers, pulled one fish in, then cleared the gear and got slabs in the water and went to work. We put another 12 fish in the boat here (a mix of white bass and short hybrids), and that was all she wrote for this day. By 11:15 all was done, the winds were picking up and we decided to call it a day.
TALLY = 30 Fish (1 largemouth, 4 legal hybrid, 4 short hybrid, 21 white bass)
TODAY’S CONDITIONS:
Start Time: 6:15a
End Time: 12:00 noon
Air Temp: 58F at trip’s start.
Water Surface Temp: 68.5F
Wind: SSE at 6, steadily building to SSE16 by trip’s end
Skies: Skies were partly cloudy at~20% at sunrise and stayed that way until ~7:40, when a heavy bank of fog rolled in and obscured everything for ~1 hour; skies cleared back to 20% clouds on a fair sky thereafter.