This morning I fished with John Duggan, his wife, Kristie Taylor, and Kristie’s mom, Sharon Taylor.
Sharon Taylor of Bernardo, TX, landed our first and largest fish of the day.
From left: Sharon Taylor, John Duggan, and Kristie Taylor. White bass made up the majority of our catch this morning. They appeared briefly on topwater after sunrise, and then fed again in the upper part of the water column for about 75 minutes beginning around 9:30am.
John works as an orthopedic surgeon with the Seton network of hospitals, and Kristie works for an Austin-based public relations firm. The two split time between a condo in Austin and a condo in Morgan’s Point, just depending on John’s “on call” schedule. Sharon traveled in from a small town west of Houston for this weekend’s reunion.
John phoned me about a month ago desiring to put together a family fishing trip over this Labor Day weekend. His family has made a tradition of reuniting and fishing over the Labor Day weekend for several years now, although they’ve typically met at on the Texas coast somewhere to do so. Although the gatherings have been great, the fishing had been disappointing, so, John decided to “stay local”, invite the family to Belton and fish freshwater instead. A fellow guide and I split their party of 6 across two boats and headed out in pursuit of white bass and hybrid striped bass.
We experienced a slow low-light bite prior to sunrise downrigging along bottom and adjusting the downrigging weights as appropriate to present our baits at whatever depth fish appeared at on sonar. We boated 1 hybrid striped bass and 5 white bass through 7:30am. Around this time, my partner called and said they’d found some fish on topwater and invited us to join in.
As we idled in, I could see the fish were well-dispersed and smallish, and that the bait they were chasing was very small. Instead of trying to get 3 relatively inexperienced casters on what I knew would be very temperamental fish, I decided to stick with the downrigging approach to present smaller baits down in a bit deeper, darker water to help mask the lures’ size with motion and a lack of light. This panned out pretty well as we boated another 13 fish before the bite died altogether.
We experienced the very predictable 8:30 to 9:30am lull, and then encountered aggressive schools of white bass working in the upper third of the water column (but not quite to the surface) as they’ve made a habit of doing for nearly 3 weeks now. On some days such fish will congregate tightly and can be worked over from a hovering position using slabs fished vertically, and on other days they seem to stay on the move more, thus requiring a downrigging approach to keep up with them. Today they were on the move, and so that meant we were, too.
Over the span of our last 75 minutes on the water, we boated 36 fish, including numerous doubles and triples on our 3-armed umbrella rigs, all from a moving boat.
There was definitely above-average boat pressure today due to the long weekend, however, when the fish failed to show in big numbers on topwater (thanks, in part to that pressure and to a stiff SSE breeze), many folks just gave up and left, leaving us free to fish without much company for the remainder of the morning — the time during which we caught the majority of our fish.
TALLY = 55 FISH, all caught and released
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TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:
Start Time: 6:30a
End Time: 11:00a
Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 79F
Water Surface Temp: 84.6F
Wind Speed & Direction: SSE9-12
Sky Conditions: More humid today, with ~60% cloud coverage varying from white to grey.
Note: Lake has dropped 0.03 feet in the last 24 hours and now stands at 593.88 above sea level, with 594.00 being full pool
Other: GT= 30
AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:
**Area 1105 through 1236
**Area 1081 through 1579 downrigging to find fish; smoking slabs to catch them
Bob Maindelle
Owner, Holding the Line Guide Service
254.368.7411 (call or text)
Salado, TX
www.HoldingTheLineGuideService.com