This past Wednesday evening, August 2nd, I fished with Mr. Richard Oates, his brother Gerald, Richard’s son, Andy, and Richard’s son-in-law, Jon. The trip was in celebration of Gerald’s birthday.
The birthday boy, Gerald Oates, was treated to a half-day outing on Lake Belton by his brother, Richard Oates of Harker Heights.
Andy Oates (you’ve probably seen him at the Harker Heights Chick-Fil-A) with a pair of nice Belton Lake hybrid we took out of 36 feet of water on artificials.
I really wasn’t sure what to expect this evening because of the wet cool front which moved into the area early this morning and soured the fishing for the first half of this morning’s trip.
As it turned out, skies slowly cleared to 60% clouds and the atmosphere dried as the afternoon turned to evening.
The bite this afternoon steadily increased right up until it shut down at 8:50 p.m.
The fishing started off slow – – we downrigged for abundant, suspended white bass and hybrid striper, but if one in every 75 or 80 fish made a motion toward the downrigger ball, we were lucky.
At the second area we fished, we found the same fish situation – – abundant and suspended – – but our “see them to catch them” ratio definitely improved as perhaps 10 to 20% of the fish seen on sonar would make a positive move toward the downrigger ball.
Eventually, we got into fish active enough to hover over top of and “smoke” for using slabs.
There was a bit of a lull between 7;15 and 8;15 when we downrigged for fish that were increasingly higher in the water column and closer to shore.
Finally, there was an all-out topwater blitz as we sighted fish in a number of areas and put nearly 100 fish in the boat in our final 45 to 50 minutes on the water by casting to fish revealing their location as they fed on the baitfish on the surface. We used slabs for this work, as well.
We closed out the evening with exactly 149 fish landed.
TALLY: 149 FISH, all caught and released
TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:
Start Time: 4:30p
End Time: 8:55p
Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 80F (actually cooler than the starting temp of this morning’s trip)
Water Surface Temp: 84.6F
Wind Speed & Direction: NW7-8 due to an early season, wet cold front’s passage
Sky Conditions: 100% cloud cover at trip’s start with the lightest of drizzle, slowly clearing and drying to 60% cloud cover
Water Level: 0.21feet low and slowly falling with only evaporative losses of ~0.02 feet per day; 0 cfs release at dam
GT = 0
Wx SNAPSHOT:
AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:
**Area 1975 downrigging with low “see to catch” ratio
**Area 904-1972 downrigging and smoking
**Area 1271-814 – pre-dusk downrigging
**Area 016-1602 – aggressive topwater action
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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