FROM VERY DIFFERENT WALKS OF LIFE — 79 FISH @ BELTON

WHO I FISHED WITH: This morning, Friday, August 7th, I fished with a group of 4. Mr. Mike Monk of Salado, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who went on to work in both the oil industry and for the State of Louisiana as an auditor, kindly sponsored a trip for two young men. Those young men were Alex Angulo, accompanied by his youth pastor, Louis Crooks, both of Killeen, and Gary Yoder. Gary is a U.S. Army Gold Star family member from Belton, and Alex’s dad is currently overseas where he serves as a government contractor. Everyone had limited prior fishing experience, so, I tried to keep it simple yet effective for our 3.5 hours on the water.

PHOTO CAPTION #1: From left: Gary Yoder, Louis Crooks, Alex Angulo, and Mike Monk.

WHEN WE FISHED: 07 August, 2020, AM

WHERE WE FISHED: Belton Lake

HOW WE FISHED: This morning, we started off in search of some “easy” topwater fishing for white bass pushing shad to the surface. Unfortunately, due mainly to a stiff SSE breeze, the bite did not last all that long, allowing us a total of 14 fish before the action was over as the sun’s rays struck the water. Next, we headed to a slightly more steeply sloped area and did a lot of looking with sonar as we put twin downriggers in equipped with both #12 and #13 Pet Spoons. We got right into fish as we downrigged and then found a school of “bottom-huggers” in about 24 feet of water. I quickly got us Spot-Locked on these fish and transitioned everyone over to fishing MAL Lures vertically. We landed another 4 fish this way before the school dissipated. We continued downrigging, picking up a single and a triple. I decided to move because, 1) the fish were smallish, and 2) I did not see any surface action in the area leading me to believe there was an abundance of active fish in this area. It was now about 8:15. I chose to take the boys up shallow to gun for sunfish to give them a very different experience than the open-water angling we’d been doing thus far.

As we began our sunfishing effort, we had 22 fish in the boat. By the time we left the sunfish grounds a short 45 minutes later, we had added another 48 fish to our tally, including longear, green, and bluegill sunfish. The boys thought it pretty cool when we spotted a 2.5′ longnose gar up in shallow water which showed some interest in swiping at one of the hooked sunfish we tried tempting it with. In our last hour, I headed us back to deep, open water once again in pursuit of larger fish.

We downrigged to find fish while catching them as we looked. We landed several fish and then witnessed a large school of white bass herd shad to the surface. We scurried to that location with downriggers still down, caught several and then set up in this area to work MAL Lures vertically for another 4 white bass. Once these fish slacked off after just a few minutes, we wrapped it up right at 10AM.

TALLY: 79 fish caught and released

OBSERVATIONS: Stiff breezes and a plethora of boat kept topwater action to a minimum this morning.

TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:

Start Time: 6:30A

End Time: 10:00A

Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 75F

Elevation: 1.71′ low, -0.04′ 24-hour change, 51 CFS flow

Water Surface Temp: 83.4F

Wind Speed & Direction: S12 before sunrise, scaling back to S7-8 thereafter

Moon Phase: Waning gibbous

GT = N/A

Wx SNAPSHOT: