CLIENTS:  This morning, Friday, July 18, I fished a “Kids Fish, Too!” trip with the Denman/Cousens families of Salado. Providing the supervision and greatly appreciated assistance was grandpa Bob Denman, and his daughter, Courtney Cousens. Doing the fishing were five-year-old Colson Cousens, seven year-old Adley Cousens, and the kids’ 35-year-old uncle (Courtney‘s brother), Skylar Denman.

TODAY’S DATE: Friday, 18 July 2025 (AM)

NEXT OPEN DATE FOR FISHING:  Monday, 04 Aug. (AM) 

NEXT OPEN DATES FOR SONAR TRAINING: 09 August (AM)

PHOTO CAPTION:  From left: Courtney and Adley Cousens, Bob Denman, Colson Cousens, and Skylar Denman.

FIND CORK RIGS & OTHER WHITE BASS/HYBRID LURES HERE: https://whitebasstools.com/

WHERE WE FISHED: Lake Belton

SUMMARY OF HOW WE FISHED:

Today’s weather was a continuation of the mild weather we’ve enjoyed all week, and today’s fishing was a continuation of the solid fishing we’ve enjoyed all week, greatly supported by that weather.

When summertime weather gets stable, the fishing gets very consistent — and all of this, despite the fact that we still have a great amount of flood water on our area lakes.

We got going at 6:40 AM, experienced about 45 minutes’ worth of light topwater action spread over a good bit of acreage. Once the sun rose and cleared the clouds in the eastern sky, that topwater action ended for good. For the next 2+ hours we did very well with the kids staying engaged in the downrigging.

We ran two downriggers, each with an umbrella rig equipped with three #12 Pet Spoons. The kids continuously landed singles, doubles, and triples. Although side-imaging routinely revealed large schools of fish out to the port or starboard, I found these fish move so quickly in the hot, summertime water that trying to Spot Lock on them, then get baits down to fish effectively can typically not be done by the time the fish move off. I tried this one time this morning, and given the kids’ limited experience with fishing vertically with spinning tackle, decided it was not more productive than downrigging, and we went back to that method.

We closed out the trip leaving the last 30 minutes or so open for fishing up shallow for sunfish mainly as an activity we could transition to knowing that the kids would get bored with the downrigging sooner or later, even though it was producing fish so well. The flooded brush makes the shallow water sunfishing more difficult than it would be otherwise, but, the kids managed to land eight sunfish under balsa floats, using bits of worm as bait.  They landed 4 panfish each.

We closed out the trip right at the 3.5 hour mark with exactly 82 fish landed.

OBSERVATIONS:

1. Fishing is getting “summertime tough” with white bass suspending more than using bottom, and focused on young-of-the-year shad which are hard to imitate with live or artificial baits.  If no topwater is encountered, the trip is going to be a tough one so far as white bass are concerned.

LATEST WATER TEMPERATURE PROFILE:

WEATHER DATA:

Start Time: 6:40A

End Time: 10:10A

Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 74F

Elevation: 7.88′ high with a 0.20′ fall in the last 24 hours with USACE releasing 3047 CFS.

Water Surface Temp: 82.9F on the surface.

Wind Speed & Direction:  S2 increasing to S11

Sky Condition: 30% grey cloud covering increasing to 60% white cloud cover on a hazy sky

Moon Phase: Waning gibbous moon at 42% illumination.

GT = 40

Wx SNAPSHOT:  

AREAS FISHED WITH MOST SUCCESS:

Area vic 183 – 12 white bass, 4 small largemouth bass on Cork Rigs at obscured sunrise

Area B0016C to B0125C – 62 white bass on downrigged Pet Spoons w/ one stop to smoke/sawtooth MAL Heavy Lures

Area 504 – 8 panfish on bait under slipfloats

Bob Maindelle

Full-time, Professional Fishing Guide and Owner of Holding the Line Guide Service

Belton Lake Fishing Guide, Stillhouse Hollow Fishing Guide

254.368.7411 (call or text)

Website: www.HoldingTheLineGuideService.com

E-mail: Bob@HoldingTheLineGuideService.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/bobmaindelle

Twitter: www.twitter.com/bobmaindelle