This past Thursday morning, April 28th, I fished Belton Lake with Ronnie Goodnight and his sons, Joshua, and John, fifth and sixth generation central Texans living in Salado.

This morning’s trip proved a good bit more difficult than any trip over the last month. The Corps of Engineers finally opened the floodgates to release the 9-10 feet of water that had accumulated following recent heavy rains. This action brought fairly dirty water directly from out of the Cowhouse Creek arm down into the main basin causing some murkiness, and the same thing was observed up to where Cedar Creek comes in on the Leon River arm, as well. This amounted to a very significant environmental change that the fish were negatively impacted by. Typically, once the water runs for two or three days at the same release rate, the fish will get used to this “new normal” and fishing will improve.

Despite the difficult circumstances, we were still able to catch fish, although I had to visit many more areas than has been necessary recently in order to put together our catch. We found fish in three distinct areas today, including a mix of hybrid striped bass and white bass in 32 feet of water, moderately congregated white bass (only) in 15 to 22 feet of water, and a mix of small whites and short hybrid striper in the lower 5 feet of the water column in 50-55 feet of water.

Over the course of our trip today, whenever I observed what I believed to be small, congregated fish near bottom, we went with a slabbing approach, and whenever I saw larger fish, either on bottom or suspended, I went with the live bait option. All of the keeper hybrid we caught today came on live shad.

TALLY = 45 fish, all caught and released

We were plagued with heavy winds this afternoon. Winds were blowing 18 to 20 straight line, with occasional higher gusts. The white bass I have been finding on Stillhouse have been heavily congregated, but in very deep water. Wind and deep water are a difficult combination as less experienced anglers tend to have difficulty in detecting when their lure is or is not on bottom. This was the case for some of our trip today.Nonetheless, we were able to overcome that issue and land a total of 48 fish, using both an “easing” and a “smoking” tactic.

The “smoking” tactic typically first comes into play as the water reaches 72°. We were just shy of that mark today, but the fish still responded fairly well. Our catch of 48 fish consisted of 47 white bass and one freshwater drum. Thanks to fairly heavy cloud cover, the evening bite wrapped up right at 7:50 PM.