This
morning I was accompanied by church buddies Mr. Ray Johnson and Mr.George Morley for a morning of live bait fishing on Belton Lake.
Ray took “high hook” honors today with this healthy flathead (yellow) catfish. It weighed in at exactly 10.50 pounds on a certified scale. It took a live shad fished just off the bottom in ~25 feet of water.
George displays one of the several hybrid striped bass we boated today. This one weighed in at 3 3/8 pounds. The hybrid seemed to prefer the middle of the water column around 11-15 feet, while the smaller and more numerous white bass held within 2 feet of the bottom.
Ray is authentic “Old Navy” — a former naval flight surgeon, and George is a retired Lampasas Independent School District principal who did a stint with the Texas National Guard. The two became friends through their participation at the same church in Killeen.
Although our results were very good today, the day was not without its challenges. The strong south wind that has blown the last several days continued today pushing almost 20mph by the time we came off the water at mid-day. Additionally, a large, 200+ boat “Bass Champs” tournament was being held today. Belton is an awful small lake for such a great amount of pressure. The water churned with boat wakes from “safe light” to 3pm as pairs of bass fisherman sped to and fro in search of a winning 3-fish limit. This wind-wake combination made boat positioning a challenge and made keeping baits down where the fish were without making them appear unnatural a bit tricky.
We fished a full 4+ hours and boated a mix of legal hybrid (18+ inches), short hybrid, white bass, and one yellow catfish using a combination of shad fished on downlines, slabs fished vertically, and bladebaits cast and worked horizontally. The fish fed on a bell-shaped curve today, starting off slowly, with the tempo of the feed increasing with cloud cover and wind velocity, then falling off beginning around 11:00am and coming to a crawl by noon.
TALLY = 70 FISH, all caught and released
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TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:
Start Time: 7:45a
End Time: 12:00p
Air Temp: 63F at sunrise.
Water Surface Temp: 65.4F
Wind: S11-18
Skies: Fully greyed over until 10:45, then clearing to 50% clouds on a fair sky
Other Notes: GT0
Areas Fished with success:
**616 Netted shad here
**1369 Whites and hybrid on shad; whites occasionally responded to bladebaits and slabs
Bob Maindelle
Holding the Line Guide Service
254-368-7411
www.HoldingTheLineGuideService.com
Salado, Texas