It is hard to do right!

I don't think that the water clarity in the Sabine River can get any better than it is right now.  For that matter, most of the lake is also just beautiful.  Gene Locke called Friday morning and said that he and Bob Crew already had his boat in the water and were waiting on me.  I threw away a growing "Things To Do" list, grabbed a cup of coffee and we were on the water twenty minutes later.

It was a laid back few hours of fishing and we caught reds, trout, and flounder before a thunderstorm sent us packing.  We easily caught the fish we kept fishing live bait in the river early, but found only small trout with spinnerbaits fishing the grass in the lake later that morning. I did talk with some folks at the game that night that limited on reds that evening fishing Traps behind Stewt's Island.

The following day I was again trying to do responsible things on dry ground only to find myself the victim of another invitation from a client that would not take no for an answer.  He was willing to fish for only a few hours and we did just that.

The conditions were perfect and rather than take advantage of the redfish, we ran straight to the revetment walls in search of trout.  Ryan caught the first fish on a Skitterwalk, but we caught most of our fish right against the rocks with a chrome/chartreuse Mirrodine XL.  They were all good fish from 19 to 24-inches.

On the way in, we drifted all the way from the north end of Pleasure Island to Stewts without ever picking up the troll motor and probably caught and released 10 to 15 more trout on the same lures.  Half of them at best would have been keepers had we been keeping fish. We did have a good fish pull off that may have been a red as we never saw it. We stayed in five feet of water for the entire drift which is about two feet deeper than I have been fishing.

I have not been seeing any birds working at all and this was the first reasonably consistent trout catching that I had done lately.  I will try fishing the flats a little deeper Monday and see if we have really found something or not.   

Comments

[John]

You probably didnt see any birds because they were all feasting on schools of 4-5" shad located on the Texas side of the jetties. Just on the surf side of the jetties on Saturday we pulled up and saw something truly amazing. It seemed like thousands of birds were just filling up on as many shad as they wanted. When we pulled up you could see schools of shad just jumping out of the water. We knew there was something big chasing them, and sure enough there were! We ended up catching several bull reds 34"-39" within about an hour. The only downfall was that there were so many gafftop and hardheads out there that everytime you threw a bait (topwater, crank, jig) you caught one and you had to deal with the slime. We also spotted several tripletail but were unable to get them to bite any lures. Finally, we landed one on a finger mullet under a cork. All in all it was one of the most exciting times I have had on the water.