Belton Lake Fishing Guide Report – 30 March 2010 – 72 FISH






I fished a half day morning trip on Belton today with a neat mother-daugther pair — Myra and Kim C. &nbsp &nbsp Kim was my kind of fisherman! In true Aggie form, she brought her spiral notebook, came with a mess of questions, asked for clarification if she didn’t understand a tactic I was trying to explain — bottom line, she was there to learn so she could be more successful on her next trip out on her family’s boat. And Myra was just so excitable … she really enjoyed catching every fish that took her bait.

Our trip was originally schedule for Monday, but, as I often do when schedules allow, I asked Myra and Kim to reconsider for Tuesday as the wind and sky conditions were much more favorable (strong S. wind and some high clouds vs. light N. winds and clear conditions). They were able to flex, and it paid off well for them.

Kim’s hybrid added a bit of quality to the quantity of whites we slabbed up today fishing the windblown shoreline.

Don’t let the blue jeans fool you — all 4 thumbs in those fishes’ mouths are manicured, polished, and clear-coated!! The girls did great today!!

Start Time: 7:15a

End Time: 12:40p

Air Temp: 54F at trip’s start.

Water Surface Temp: ~58.4F.

Wind: Winds were already pushing from the S at 10 at sunrise, and increased slowly up to 18mph from the S. by 10am, and then leveled off.

Skies: Skies were fair.


We started our day at Area 099 mainly giving the girls an introduction to verical jigging and waiting to see if any action would develop. We didn’t catch any fish here, as it only took about 10 minutes beyond sunrise for some bird action to kick in.

We found very actively feeding birds over top of fish that were occasionally breaking the surface in pursuit of shad at Area 608. The fish were moving very quickly, and were up in the top 5-8 feet of the water column. I didn’t realize this at first, and wondered why all the bird action with nothing showing on bottom and nothing touching our slabs (fished on bottom). I backed off on the sensitivity on my sonar to reduce surface clutter, and there they were. So, we altered our presentation to get our baits just under the surface and began to slowly but surely put fish in the boat. At first we tried smoking, but we weren’t passing over enough fish to have this pay off well, so I set our flatlines with Rip Shads and a single downrigger with a White Willow spoon, and fished them all up high. After about 50 minutes of effort in this area, we’d bagged 13 fish, all decent ~12 inch white bass. By then the birds were beginning to light on the surface and the shallow bite was drying up quickly.

We headed over to Area 132 and picked up 2 whites.

We saw a brief resurgence in the bird action on the N. side of Area 028 and fished that to no avail.

We then headed to Area 579 to search a bit deeper and were immediately rewarded for that call. I spotted abundant schooled white bass holding on and just above bottom in ~30 of water. We let slabs down and up came the white bass, over and over again for about 90 minutes straight. The girls put 56 whites in the boat as well as a single 19″ 3.5 pound hybrid. Only 8 or 10 of these whites were short, with the remainder going just shy of 12 inches. All were healthy and had not yet spawned. Every one came on the 3/8 oz. TNT 180 slab. It was right on for imitating the forage size of the threadfin shad today.

By 12:10 or so, things were slowing to a crawl and by 12:30 the fish were done altogether.

We headed back in, snapped a few photos and released the few that we’d boxed for pictures.

TALLY = 72 Fish, all caught and released