This past Monday, April 11th, I met up with Bob Schwartz of Temple, his son, Will Schwartz of Austin, and local businessman, Jeff Jones (a friend of Bob’s), for a morning of fishing on Lake Belton. This was Bob’s third trip with me, Will’s second, and Jeff’s first.
From left: Bob is a retired judge, Jeff runs an environmental services company in Temple and has a son who is a junior in high school, and Will works in logistics and has 3 young children. The trio put together a bag of 73 fish this morning.
As we got going, I led us in prayer to settle my mind a bit. I hit some road debris on FM439 as I was headed out to get bait and wound up having to change my flat passenger-side front tire in the dark and rain on the shoulder of the road. This threw my timing off for the morning and I felt a bit frazzled before 7am ever rolled around.
I then laid out all of the options to these fellows, including the option of some fast action for smaller fish on light spinning tackle up shallow, and/or the option of fishing bait for fewer but larger fish out deeper.
It was clear that Bob and Jeff wanted to learn about fishing as much as they desired to catch fish, so, we agreed that providing exposure to multiple tactics would be helpful and desirable.
Because of the very heavy, dark cloud cover (to the point of light rain), the low-light fishery that usually develops in advance of sunrise was pushed back a bit this morning. In the interest of teaching, I explained about the process of finding and gathering bait, and we spent some time patrolling for spawning shad.
Afterwards, we set out for shallow water and I kept my eyes peeled for birds feeding on baitfish forced to the surface by the gamefish we desired to catch. It didn’t take long to find action using my optics — about 30 laughing gulls were tearing it up in 13-19 feet of water on a flat. We got to them, closed the distance with the trolling motor, and began fan casting blade baits for consistent hookups over a 75 minute span.
As it became clear that this shallow-water bite was about to wrap up (as evidenced by greatly reduced bird activity and a falling catch rate), we headed out to deeper water.
We fished two areas with live shad, pickup up keeper hybrid at the first area before the commotion involved in catching them drew smaller fish in forcing us to leave. The second area produced only smallish fish.
In talking with other regular Belton anglers, this seems to be the trend this season. I’m running at about a 15% proportion of keeper hybrid stripers (those 18 inches or greater) to the rest of the catch (short hybrid, white bass of all sizes, drum, blue catfish, largemouth and smallmouth.
We finished up this morning’s trip with exactly 73 fish boated after the first bite began around 8:15, thanks to that dark cloud cover moving the timing of the morning bite back a bit.
TALLY: 73 Fish, all caught and released
TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:
Start Time: 7:15a
End Time: 11:45a
Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 68F
Water Surface Temp: 66.1F
Wind Speed & Direction: Winds were ESE at 3-4 until 9:15. Then skies cleared and the winds picked up to 11-13mph
Sky Conditions: 90-100% grey skies to the point of light rain until 9:15, then clearing to 40% clouds.
Water Level: 594.74 and falling with 594.0 being full pool. Water being released at 765 cubic feet per second. Lake fell 0.05 feet in the past 24 hours
Other: GT= 50
AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:
**Area 1735 casting to shallow whites with blades
**Area vic 098 keeper hybrid followed by small fish
**Area vic 953 lots of smaller fish, followed by bluecat that came into the chum
Bob Maindelle
Owner, Holding the Line Guide Service
254.368.7411 (call or text)
Website: www.HoldingTheLineGuideService.com
E-mail: Bob@HoldingTheLineGuideService.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/bobmaindelle