Belton Lake Fishing Guide Report – 26 April 2010 – 66 FISH






I fished a half-day morning trip with 3 generations from the same family gathered together in Temple to celebrate the 81st birthday of their dad and grand-dad “Pa”. Aboard this morning was “Pa”, his son Joe, and Joe’s two sons, Cory and Tom. The day was forecast to be bright and with light winds, so I knew we’d better get an early start and make “hay while the sun shines” early on. We met at 6:30a — that gave me a few extra minutes before sunrise to get all the gear stowed and do a dockside explanation of some of the techniques I anticipated we’d be using today.

Joe got the best of the bunch today with a 5.25 pound blue cat. We were anchored up over a good bunch of fish and bait fishing live bait on downlines … the blue hit the one perch we had out from among 5 other lines all baited with shad.

From L to R: Joe, “Pa”, Tom, and Cory lip the best 5 of the white bass we caught in the low-light frenzy this morning using bladebaits


Start Time: 6:30a

End Time: 11:45am

Air Temp: 57F at trip’s start, quickly warming into the high 70’s.

Water Surface Temp: ~69F

Wind: Winds were slack at trip’s start. And only puffed out of the S to SSW at 5-7 for short periods of time through around 11a. After 11a, the speeds picked up to about 8 sustained, but, it was too little, too late as the morning bite was over.

Skies: Skies were 100% greyed over.


Our first stop this morning came at Area 377. I rigged the boys up with slabs, thinking the bite would start off slowly requiring a little bottom work, and knowing that the slabs could be cast if the fish came up on top. We’ll, we had only landed 2 fish immediately after sunrise when the fish rose to the surface and fed in force for about 20 minutes. I quickly switched everyone over to bladebaits when, on a test cast at some surface feeding whites, I observed the whites chase, but not strike, my slab worked just under the surface. Once we got the blades working, everyone caught fish — a mix of all sizes of white bass and some short hybrids — while this barely subsurface action lasted. We’d tallied 39 fish by the time they slacked off. We continued fancasting and counting the blades down for about 30 minutes more and hooked up steadily. As the fish got lower and slower, we switched over to slabs and worked them off bottom for about 20 minutes more, picking up fish just occasionally. By 9:00a these shallow fish were done. We left this area with 47 fish landed.

We then went hunting some deep haunts to shoot for additional whites and perhaps some hybrid. We looked over Area 619 and saw both bait and gamefish on sonar, so I anchored down and we put 6 downlines out with threadfin shad at first. Once things settled, we began pick up fish steadily. We boated a total of 19 fish here in a little less than 2 hours’ time including 1 hybrid, 2 blue catfish, and 16 whites. Around 10:45, after a nice flurry of activity, the wind stopped and it got dead calm. The fish quit as well and never did get going again. We stayed on for another 15 minutes as I continued to see bait and fish, but couldn’t get them to respond.

At 11a, we made a run and checked things out in the vicinity of Area 376 and 211. We never had any real strong sonar reading, and only got one hit in our last hour, but landed none.

We finished up the day with 66 fish, the largest of which was the big blue cat that Joe caught on a perch — and we had a fun time doing it!! Topics of conversation ranged to everything from broken sunglasses, cold water triathlons, beauty contest losers, TAKS testing, who was leading in the fish count, and more!!


TALLY = 66 FISH