This past Thursday morning I fished a multi-species trip on Lake Belton with DK and his four-year-old daughter.
DK hoists one of the “keeper”-sized (18+ inch) hybrid striped bass he landed on slabs this morning as his daughter gets about as close to the fish as she dared. This fish went right at 4 pounds.
I was very excited to watch the weather develop and see a very slow moving, mild cold front creep into our area mainly bringing clouds and light winds, but very little temperature drop. For reasons known only to them, white bass and hybrid striper really seem to crank up under these conditions.
DK and I visited by phone the night before the trip and then again before he was due to leave the Austin area to make sure we had a sufficient weather window without the threat of lightning to get out and enjoy the good fishing that lie ahead.
Long story short, we caught fish from start to finish for a solid four hours. We devoted our first three hours to chasing white bass, and the last hour catching sunfish up in the still-warm shallow water so that his daughter could catch a number of fish “all by herself”.
The white bass started the morning up in shallow water under 15 feet, with a few individuals briefly dimpling the surface as they chased shad towards the surface. After the (obscured) sunrise, the fish moved out deeper – – to between 20 and 26 feet. The formula that worked for us this morning was to find active schools of fish using the downrigger, and then to work over those active schools using vertical tactics until the fish lost interest, and then pick up again with the downriggers and repeat that process over and over again.
In this way, we boated 48 white bass, two “keeper” hybrid striped bass, and one largemouth, for a total of 52 fish by 10 AM. We then went up shallow and landed an additional 38 sunfish, including green sunfish, bluegill sunfish, and longear sunfish, thus putting the grand total for our trip at 90 fish boated in right at four hours.
A nice little fringe benefit of being willing to fish in the rain was the very scant additional boat traffic – – we saw only two bass boats all morning, both probing the shallows and therefore had the white bass all to ourselves.
TALLY = 90 fish, all caught and released
TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:
Start Time: 7:15a
End Time: 11:15a
Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 64F
Water Surface Temp: 75.6F
Wind Speed & Direction: NNW6-8
Sky Conditions: 100% grey cloud cover
Water Level: ~0.01 feet high with only evaporative losses
GT = 0
AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:
**Area 527 – soft plastics for low-light, pre-sunrise fish up shallow
**Areas 1821-1822-172-171-1823 – vertical tactics for white bass in 20-26 feet of water on slabs
**Areas 1793 – sunfish under slipfloats in shallow cover
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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