This past Friday evening I fished a multi-species trip on Lake Belton with Dave Covington of Belton, and his five-year-old son, Levi.

At 6:00pm, Dave, Levi, and I encountered this massive school of white bass numbering, literally, in the thousands.  The school was 23 feet thick and hung around our boat, drawn by the commotion created by their schoolmates being caught, for 25-30 minutes.  We caught a fish on most every drop of our slabs, quickly taking 40 fish during this feeding spree.

Dave Covington with his son, 5-year-old Levi, holding a 13 inch class white bass — one of the 80 we landed this evening using both downrigging and vertical jigging techniques.

This fishing trip was one of several “outdoorsy” activities the family planned to participate in as they camped out for the weekend at Cedar Ridge Park on Belton Lake. We began our trip at 3:30 and fished right up until dark at 7 PM. Given Levi Levi’s age, I came prepared to fish in a number of different ways so as to keep his interest up.

Of the various fishing options I described to Dave, he thought starting off by downrigging would be a good move.  I took us to a relatively timber-free area where I thought we could contact fish using the Cannon downriggers, and soon after arriving and looking things over with sonar, we put a single downrigger ball in the water set to 30 feet with a tandem rigged pair of Pet Spoons on the business end. Our first line was in the water less than 30 seconds and we had our first of many downrigger-caught fish on the line. We alternated between a two-arm and three-armed rig and routinely caught both singles and doubles ranging from one-year- old fish to three-year-old fish.

In a number of instances the fish so aggressively tracked after the downrigger ball, that I knew they would respond to a vertical tactic, so, several times we stopped downrigging, put the boat into a hover using the Ulterra trolling motor (the newest version just released with much improved Spot Lock capability), and let our slabs down into the melee. It was not uncommon to catch 10 or 15 fish at a clip before the fish lost interest. When they did, we simply went back to downrigging and repeated the whole process.

We took a short break to add some variety to the trip for Levi’s sake by going up shallow and fishing for sunfish, picking up 15 bluegill, green sunfish, longear sunfish, and redear sunfish (and keeping each one in the livewell, although we did stop just short of naming them individually!).

It was at this transition from sunfishing back to angling for white bass that young Levi burst forth into song, charming us with his rendition of that Willie ‘n’ Waylon classic “Mommas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”.  Enough said.

Right around 6 PM we encountered a massive school of white bass numbering in the thousands. Although Levi’s interest was starting to fade at this point, David and I managed to keep him engaged as we quickly added 40 more fish to our count before the school drifted off. We followed that up with a final round of downrigging and took our fish count up to a grand total of 80 fish boated by the time the evening was through and night had come.

TALLY = 80 fish, all caught and released

 

TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:

Start Time: 3:30p

End Time:  7:00p

Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 68F

Water Surface Temp:  75.5F

Wind Speed & Direction:  NNE7-8

Sky Conditions: 100% grey cloud cover

Water Level: ~0.22 feet high and slowly rising thanks to light, area-wide rainfall

GT = 50

 

AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:

**Area 211-1675-1619 – rig to jig

**Area 1753 – sunfish

**Area vic 817 – smoking

**Area vic 1666 – low light downrigging at 20′ breakline

 

 

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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