Caught ’em 5 at a Time!! — 75 fish with Chad & Coitt

This past Tuesday, October 12, I fished with father and son team Chad and Coitt Messersmith of Georgetown, Texas. Coitt is 10 years old, has both an older and younger sister, and primarily had fished from the bank prior to this morning’s trip. He and dad gave the girls the slip and came out to Belton Lake for some guy time this morning.

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Father and son fishing with Chad Messersmith and his 10-year-old son, Coitt on Belton this past Tuesday.

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Five at a time!!  We caught 2 white bass on Coitt’s 2-armed rig and 3 white bass on Chad’s 3-armed rig as an aggressive school crashed into our spread down around 27 feet.

Due to the very calm conditions today, the presence of bait was evident where it was near the surface during the low light period just before and after sunrise.  As I observed the baitfish and rough fish disrupting the surface, I checked things over with sonar, and was able to put Chad and Coitt onto our first fish of the morning by finding white bass amidst this surface activity. We used downriggers with balls set between 14 and 17 feet to target fish over a slightly deeper bottom. On this first stop, most of the fish we encountered were small.

We moved on and fished a steep underwater slope along the 25 to 35 foot contour and watched sonar to see schools of white bass that were up off of bottom and hunting, as well as bottom hugging white bass that came up off the bottom out of curiosity and aggression as they swam up toward the downrigger ball. Whenever fish came up off the bottom after the ball, those fish were sure to hit our Pet Spoons as they passed by several seconds later.  On one pass, using both a 2-armed and 3-armed rig, we actually caught 5 fish at a time!

We moved on to a more gentle underwater slope and fished the 30 to 36 foot contour with downriggers and did well, noticing as we trolled that there were also large bottom hugging schools of fish in this area. After we had put a number of fish in the boat on the downrigger, we tried using slabs over top of these heavily schooled, bottom oriented fish to see if we could tempt them. They actually responded quite well, despite the less than ideal, bright, calm conditions. We were able to use a smoking tactic to put a number of fish in the boat quite quickly using this tactic.

By now our fish count stood at 47 and the clock showed 10:30 AM. We headed up shallow at this point to fish for sunfish and to show Chad and Coitt how they might adapt this technique to their future bank fishing efforts. Over the next hour, Coitt put 28 fish in the boat from out of this shallow, cover filled water, including bluegill sunfish, longear sunfish, yellow belly sunfish, green sunfish, and largemouth bass.

We concluded this morning’s trip with 75 fish landed.

TALLY = 75 fish, all caught and released

 

TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:

Start Time: 7:25a

End Time:  11:45a

Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 57F

Water Surface Temp:  78.6F

Wind Speed & Direction:  Light and variable.

Sky Conditions:  Bright, calm, clear post-frontal conditions

Water Level: ~0.13 feet high with only evaporative losses

GT = 50

 

AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:

**Area 168/169 – downrigging for white bass

**Area 1125-511 – downrigging for white bass

**Area 1074-509 – downrigging for white bass to find them, then smoking to capitalize on the find

**Area  166 – sunfish

 

Bob Maindelle

Owner, Holding the Line Guide Service

254.368.7411 (call or text)

Website:www.HoldingTheLineGuideService.com

E-mail:Bob@HoldingTheLineGuideService.com

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