Cold weather hasn't slowed 'em down!

That first boat ride the past two mornings were COLD!  It warmed up around noon each day, but the wind was more of a problem yesterday.  We fished an outgoing tide Tuesday that made loading the boat back up a challenge, but the water came back in very slowly all day yesterday.

Cousin Paul with a solid slot red on a cold morning!

The bite pattern changed each day, but the catching was just as good on both programs.  Tuesday, Paul and John drove in from Katy the night before and we caught trout and reds from daylight until the time we quit just after lunch at the Muddy Water Marina.  Had we been able to feel our hands early on, we may have done even better.  We caught and missed our largest trout of the day on the first stop swimming Flats Minnows in 6 to 8 feet of water.

The wind made it even colder yesterday morning, but Major Salcher and Gene Kellum each brought a bag of extra clothes and had them all on when we left the dock.  When they started shedding them just before noon we ran out of storage space on the boat!

We struggled until 11:00.  The shallow bite only produced one red and 3 keeper trout along with a bunch of undersized fish so we made a long slow loop through East Pass and out into the lake.  We never even stopped to fish and returned to the ICW to try something different.  Plan B worked and we finished with a limit of slot reds and 19 very nice trout up to five pounds.

I held the boat in the channel and we literally soaked Flats Minnows, Sea Shads and Swim Baits on the bottom on the 18 to 22 foot breaks.  The larger the trout, the slower they wanted you to move the bait.  I have never caught fish on a Swim Bait without swimming it, but they would enhale it as soon as you lifted it up off the bottom.

I was catching them on a bug juice Flats Minnow until Gene started wearing us out on much larger trout with a fire tiger Swim Bait.  When we left we were in short sleeve shirts and there wasn't even a breeze.  As good as we had done, had I had my waders on board I would have gone back out and made an afternoon wade!

Alex Daubenheyer came down from Arkansas with his Grandpa, Steve Pullin, and fished with me in a cold driving rain most of the morning the day before his Hogs lost to the Tigers.  I forgot that I promised to put a picture of this big trout in my report and posted his redfish without even giving it a second thought.  Old people are bad about that!

Okay, Alex......Better late than never and that's still a great trout!

We are catching and releasing at least one or two big specks most every trip and I haven't had a single group that wanted to wade to date.  With so many of these fish coming off small flats bordering the ICW, I have to believe that they are moving up on the shallow flats in the lake as well.  I have a couple of days open as of right now over the next two weeks and I plan on finding out.

You don't know if you don't go!