This past Friday afternoon I fished with Father Brad St. Romain on Belton Lake. I ran a multi-species trip, mainly targeting white bass.
Among the 55 fish landed this evening, two of our white bass eclipsed the 14″ mark. Those are respectable white bass on a relatively infertile lake like Belton. One of those large whites came on a slab, and the one pictured here came on a bladebait.
This past Friday afternoon I fished with Father Brad St. Romain on Belton Lake. I ran a multi-species trip, mainly targeting white bass.
Father Brad has served as the rector of Saint Francis Episcopal church in Temple since 2011. The two of us have been trying to find a mutually agreeable fishing day since June of this year. When excessive wave height forced the cancellation of an offshore fishing trip I was to attend with a friend, I contacted Brad to see if we might make this a win – win.
Fortunately, Brad had a good bit of prior fishing experience, primarily in shallow salt water. He was definitely able to handle a spinning rod, and that would help him put fish in the boat this afternoon.
For the first three hours of our four-plus hour trip, we searched for heavily concentrated white bass in water ranging from 25 to 40 feet deep, set up in a hover over top of these fish using my new and improved Minn Kota Ulterra trolling motor, and vertically jigged using 3/8 oz. silver slabs complete with stinger hooks.
I’ll take a quick departure here and share that the positioning on this new #MinnKota #Ulterra unit is many times better than the positioning capability on the previous version. Not only does this unit more quickly acquire its position after the Spot Lock button is pressed, I noted that there was much less meandering to the left, right, forwards, and backwards then with the previous model. My first impressions are very favorable. You should know I have not yet set up the heading sensor which allows for “jogging” to the left, right, front, and back. This will truly be icing on the cake.
Back to fishing … with about an hour left before nightfall, I left behind the deep water vertical work, and moved us up into shallower water, hoping to find an onshore migration of white bass pushing shad shoreward and toward the surface as dark approached.
As we arrived at our new area, I noted fish holding consistently along the slope from 20 to 22 feet deep. We tried jigging for these fish to no avail, and then hooked up downriggers to tempt them. This did the trick, allowing us to pull four fish in three passes. Thinking that we may be able to get the same or better results by casting horizontally, I took us both up to the front deck and we began fan casting with blade baits. Long story short, we stuck with the blade baits and consistently put fish in the boat right up until the fish quit at dark.
We ended this trip with 55 fish boated for our efforts, including white bass, hybrid striped bass, largemouth bass, and a freshwater drum.
TALLY = 55 fish, all caught and released
TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:
Start Time: 3:00p
End Time: 7:20p
Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 81F
Water Surface Temp: 77.1F
Wind Speed & Direction: SSE8
Sky Conditions: Fair skies with 20% white cloud cover
Water Level: ~0.01 feet high with only evaporative losses
GT = 0
AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:
**Areas vic 192, 166/1814, 1818, 1819 — all deep vertical jigging for white bass with slabs
**Areas vic 816 and vic 1625 — low light shallow bite on bladebaits
Bob Maindelle
Owner, Holding the Line Guide Service
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