TURKEY SHOOT AT LAKE BELTON !! – 232 FISH

WHO I FISHED WITH: Earlier this week I fished with Pastor Robert Butts, his 17-year-old son, Jack, and long-time client Marcus Mitchell, all of Georgetown. Robert leads the Union Hall Baptist Church, located in Liberty Hill, TX. Marcus works for a company which produces products to track down “bugs” in complex computer server systems, and Jack is entering his senior year of high school.



WHEN WE FISHED: 10 August, 2020, AM


WHERE WE FISHED: Belton Lake



HOW WE FISHED: I panicked a bit this morning when, at 6:19AM (with a planned trip start time of 6:30AM), Marcus let me know his party would be delayed due to a car fire on U.S. Hwy. 190 which had morning traffic backed up.

As it was, this delay only cost them about 10 minutes, but, when low-light topwater action lasts only for a brief 40-50 minute window, I was concerned that the nice catch and fast action which normally accompany that would be jeopardized this morning. When everyone arrived, they hustled to the boat. I postponed my safety briefing, but not my prayer, and then we took off for the fishing grounds.

Over the next 50 minutes, we enjoyed non-stop catching to the tune of exactly 40 white bass landed, all on my new MAL Lures.

See MAL Lures here.

When the sun hit the water, the fish hit the road and shut down in this locale. We went searching for fish away from the crowd and found good results in two distinct locations. My plan was to cover water with the downriggers to find active fish and then fish for them vertically with MAL Lures. However, sonar revealed fish ready to feed before we even got ‘riggers in the water. I Spot-Locked on these fish, initially in 28 feet of water, and we went to work with the MAL Lures simply dropping and reeling them up, expecting strikes as the lures rose off bottom. When the fish slowed a bit, I jogged us 2 or 3 boat lengths deeper to ~32 feet and we kept right on nailing fish. I had Garmin LiveScope playing so the fellows could know when to crank their lures up as fish passed by. As one particularly large, suspended school of fish passed beneath the boat, Marcus exclaimed, “Oh, man, it’s a turkey shoot!”. It was a pretty wild morning.

By the time the fish slacked off in this area, we’d taken exactly 119 more fish for a tally of 159 fish by 9:30AM. A thorough sonar scrub of the area revealed that the fish departed this area very shortly following a wind shift from S to SW.

We moved on to one final location where I’d been finding some fish suspended in over 40 feet of water in the late morning last week. Again, my intent was to downrig to find fish and then work MAL Lures through them to capitalize on what we’d found. As we downrigged, I noted a large shoal of fish off to our left with my side-imaging manually set to 130 feet to the left and right. I set a waypoint on the center of mass of these fish, then used the i-Pilot Link system to send the trolling motor to the waypoint with GPS precision. As the boat moved, we cleared the two white bass which struck the downriggers as we made our way to the fish, stowed the trolling gear, and got ready to work the MAL Lures vertically.

Long story short, in our final 40 minutes on the water Robert, Jack, and Marcus bagged another 73 fish, including 2 hybrid stripers and 71 white bass, to end the 4-hour trip with a take of 232 fish, every last one of which were released.

TALLY: 232 fish caught and released


TEMPERATURE PROFILE :

0 feet 84F

5 feet 84.8F

10 feet 85F

15 feet 85F

20 feet 85F

25 feet 84.7F

30 feet 83.7F

35 feet 81.2F

45 feet 76.4F

45 feet 72.1F

50 feet 69.1F

55 feet 67.4F

60 feet 66.6F


TODAY’S CONDITIONS/NOTES:

Start Time: 6:40A

End Time: 10:40A

Air Temp. @ Trip’s Start: 77F

Elevation: 1.86′ low, -0.04′ 24-hour change, 51 CFS flow

Water Surface Temp: 82.9F

Wind Speed & Direction: S11 before sunrise, increasing slowly to S13, the shifting and increasing to SW13-14 around 9AM

Moon Phase: Waning gibbous with 61% illumination

GT = 75




AREAS FISHED WITH SUCCESS:

**Area 813 to B0018G- aggressive low-light topwater action — 40 fish in ~50 minutes

**Area vic 788 – 2 short hops; vertical work with MAL Lures — 119 fish in ~90 minutes **Area vic 1411 – one Spot-Lock; vertical work with MAP Lures — 73 fish in ~40 minutes



Bob Maindelle

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

Belton Lake Fishing Guide, Stillhouse Hollow Fishing Guide

Great report. Love Lake Belton. Used to fish there for white bass and hybrids. Going to order some of your MAL lures for our fishing on Eagle Mountain. We have good white bass action too.

Thanks for sharing. Great report.

Very detailed, helpful report. The MAL lures look very similar to Mepps #4 longcast baits. Question about the clevis (connects blade to wire): Is it perpendicular to the wire or is it sloped toward the rear like Mepps is?

Here is the whole story on this bait. I worked with Mepps to customize this for white bass:

The History of Maindelle’s All-Purpose Lure ( the “MAL” lure)
Available only through Holding the Line Guide Service

My love affair with white bass and hybrid stripers began during my senior year in high school. My dad, a Vietnam-era Army officer, got orders to Fort McPherson, near Atlanta, Georgia, at the end of my junior year of high school in Liverpool, New York.

From our home in Jonesboro, Georgia, I trailered our 14-foot aluminum V-hull with a 9.9 horsepower Evinrude outboard down I-85 to West Point Lake, an impoundment on the Chattahoochee River, right on the Georgia-Alabama border, near LaGrange, Georgia.

One evening, while fishing near a shoal (that’s Georgian for hump), a mixed school of white bass and hybrid striped bass forced a school of shad to the surface and began feeding on them violently. The fish were aggressive, the shad were jumping out of the water trying to escape, my topwater lure was repeatedly annihilated, and, when it was all over, one of the most memorable fishing moments of my life was seared into my brain.

Since that night on the Chattahoochee, I have pursued white bass, hybrid stripers, and striped bass every chance I get.

In 2006, I began guiding for white bass and hybrid striped bass professionally, after pursuing them on Lake Belton and Stillhouse Hollow Reservoir for the previous 14 years.

Take a look in any tackle catalog and you will quickly see there are not a lot of lures, nor tackle, designed specifically for whites and hybrid. Many of the lures I rely on day-in and day-out I either make myself or modify from commercially available versions.

Barring flooding, I believe June and July are the two most difficult months of fishing for whites and hybrids all year. Downrigging in the summer is always productive in and of itself, but, some folks don’t care for trolling. Downrigging allows me to effectively cover water while watching my sonar like a hawk for signs of congregated whites and hybrid, either suspended or on bottom, to stop and fish for.
Until 2018, I struggled with an effective lure to tempt tightly grouped whites and hybrids on the occasions I could find them. It was frustrating to look and look for fish, only to find them and then not be able to get them to bite well.

In 2019, I had a breakthrough. On a whim, I decided to handmake my own tailspinners. I knew tailspinners were effective, but, the commercially available versions all had significant drawbacks. My design addressed and improved on these flaws, and the baits worked. However, they were prone to tangling just enough to be annoying, and, due to their compact size and heavy weight, a lot of my rookie clients lost fish right at the boat as they left fish dangling over the water instead of swinging them over the side of the boat.

I never marketed my tailspinners, as I just wasn’t confident that the average angler could make them work to their full potential.

If nothing else, I knew the spinning action of the tailspinner attracted fish. I continued experimenting in 2018 and 2019 with in-line spinners. Again, I knew from previous experience that in-line spinners had their drawbacks, and I developed my own versions to combat those problems, chief of which was a slow sink rate. Using tungsten, I worked around the sink rate issue.

About the time I got the spinners where I wanted them, fall weather came in during 2019 and I was back onto a hot slab bite with my Hazy Eye Slabs equipped with stinger hooks. The spinners were relegated to the back shelf.

As the end of May rolled around in 2020, and the live shad bite for hybrid had about run its course, I once again began experimenting with my spinners. At this same time, a friend and fellow Lake Belton multi-species angler, Bill Pasko, shared with me about his successes with spinners. He was using a large Mepps Aglia spinner with great success.

One day, as we compared notes at the Westcliff boat ramp on Lake Belton, he showed me a modified version of the model of Mepps Aglia he was using, complete with a barbless hook for quick, clean releases.
That day I got on the phone with both Laurie Powell and Darryl Laurent of Mepps and described my desire to obtain small, but heavy, in-line spinners from them for the purpose of targeting white bass and hybrid striped bass.

After some trial and error, and some willingness to be flexible on Mepps’ behalf, they worked with me to produce the white bass/hybrid-specific model of in-line spinner now found only on my website, and named the Maindelle’s All-Purpose Lure (MAL lure, for short).

I have now fished with multiple iterations and versions of this lure and now feel the version I am offering is the very best combination of all of the colors and components out there. Unlike my reservations with my tailspinners, I have no reservations about putting this in the hands of the average angler, and knowing his or her results will improve, and especially so in the difficult summer months from late May into late September.

This spinner uses the heavy features of the Mepps LongCast model to effect a fast sink rate, but with colors, blade sizes, hook sizes, hook dressings, and hook attachments which are specifically geared toward white bass and hybrid striped bass, all at a price equivalent to that on Mepps’ online catalog for the LongCast versions not specifically designed for whites and hybrid.
I have tried to give anglers every reason to try this lure developed specifically for white bass and hybrid stripers, including keeping pricing in check.

My favorite pairing for this incredibly effective bait is to use Sufix 832 Advanced Superline (a braid) in 20 pound test, attached to a clear, 35-pound test Aquateko Invisaswivel, which is then attached to a ~24-inch fluorocarbon leader in 25-pound test. A swivel is necessary to eliminate line twist, and the Invisaswivel is easier on your rod’s tip than metallic swivels.

I use a Berkley Inshore BSINS701ML, 7’, 1-piece spinning rod with a Pflueger President PRESP25 spinning reel (5.2:1 gear ratio).

This bait excels in two applications: 1) “smoking” for bottom-hugging and suspended fish, and 2) sight casting to topwater fish. In both cases a fast retrieve is best. For topwater fish, keeping the rod tip low to the water and reeling just fast enough to keep the bait from skipping out of the water is the key to success.

Smoking involves allowing the lure to fall to the bottom and very quickly reeling it up at least half-way off the bottom. I like to use the MAL vertically in conjunction with well-tuned colored sonar and/or Garmin LiveScope so I can see fish response to the baits and know when to keep reeling (as the lure is being chased), or when to allow the lure to drop back to bottom (if the fish are less enthusiastic).
In both tactics, starting the retrieve with a single, hard, fast turn of the reel’s handle is essential to getting the spinner’s blade turning.

The MAL lures can be found on my website. Use the URL www.HoldingTheLineGuideService.com or www.FishCenTex.com. Once your are on the website, click on “PRODUCTS” found on the far right side of the black menu bar on the top of each webpage.

To give these a try go here: MAL Lure

Solid post. Thanks for sharing.

Dennis,

The MAL Lure features the sloped clevis. I feel this helps get the blade spinning sooner and with less force than does a "standard" clevis.

Has this been your experience?