Colburn's Sabine Connection

It is a mess!

It seems like light years since I have posted, but fishing has not been very high on my priority list since Ike left town.  I was initially going to post pictures and get something out last week, but pictures do not do this justice.  Even though I make my living fishing, I feel guilty even mentioning the word with so many friends and family right here in Orange, Bridge City, and West Orange buried in mud and uncertain about there immediate future. 

I have not put my boat in the water since the day before the hurricane.  We have spent every day shoveling mud, cutting out sheet rock, bagging wet insulation, and helping folks stuff a lifetime of memories in garbage bags and drag them out to the road.  Most of the power has been restored, but we have lots of families looking for a place to live right now.

Aside from the devastation from the surge, I was most shocked by the numbers of fish wedged in fences, stacked in the roads, and piled in marina parking lots.  There were a lot of redfish, drum, and mullet, but I was most surprised by the number of bass rotting in the sun.  The bayous are still full of dead fish and they stink.  We also have dead cows, coyotes, deer, and gators on the banks of the river.

I have worked in several homes and the Boat Club on both Adam's and Cow bayou the past four days and that water looks very bad.  I talked with Hunter Lewis today after he made a pretty good round in the lake to check conditions.  As expected, they saw a lot of debris and dead animals, but he was most surprised that areas like Coffee Ground Cove were now much deeper.  He said for the most part, the entire lake was about two feet deeper on average.

Area residents can tell you where a lot of that mud that was on the bottom of the lake went!  We had a learning curve following Rita, but things have really changed this time.  He also added that the water in the lake did not look bad, but any water running out of the cuts or bayous on the Louisiana side looked terrible.  Justin Berles had a great day on reds last week, but he said that they could not fish in in the back of Madam Johnson or the Gator Hole due to the odor.

Albert Bates hammered the reds fishing evenings in the lake last week, but he said the water was really off-colored where they caught most of their fish.  Judging by the number of shad we shoveled out of driveways and off the road I feared that most of our bait was dead.  They must be really prolific because they are already showing up again.

While area marinas are destroyed, most of the launches are reasonably safe to use. There is an incredible amount of partially submerged debris so be especially careful.  We pulled a four wheeler tied to a riding lawn mower out of Cow bayou last Monday. The people with destroyed homes on the bayous are going to take issue with the smallest of wakes so respect their property on the way to the lake.

I hope to start getting back on the water next week, but it all depends on how well the clean-up goes.  Lord knows I need to pull some trips and the fishing is apparently good enough to do so, but we have no place for visiting fishermen to stay and it will be that way for a while.  For that matter, we don't even have a place to clean fish right now.  No more shrimp burgers either!

Not unlike post-Rita, I was overwhelmed by the offers of help from not only clients across the state, but readers of this blog that I have never even met as well.  Those e-mails and calls were very much appreciated and easily the silver lining in dealing with this mess every day.  Thanks to all of you and we will get back to fishing as soon as possible!  

Bite continues to improve, but so do the chances of another hurricane!

If we weren't still faced with the possibility of a hurricane rolling in here this weekend, I could really get excited about the fishing.  I fished Jim Thomas today and we had a heck of a trip.  The water was everywhere and still rising, but the fish did not seem to mind at all.  The bayous, the river, and the lake are continuing to clear. 

Once again, we caught slot redfish until we got tired of catching redfish.  We caught them on shad, chicken on a chain sea shads and Blurp molting shrimp.  We also caught some very solid trout and flounder on the Blurp.

  We caught fish all morning in the bayous, but found trout feeding on the flooded flats just off the river after lunch.  They were in the flooded grass in 2-3 feet of water and they would unload on the Sea Shad rigged on a quarter ounce head. There was so much dead coontail moss and floating mats of grass around Conway's that it was like flipping the hydrilla on T-Bend.  The bait and the trout were in the open pockets. 

Don Hubbard and Gerald Burleigh got back to the dock about he same time we did and they had a very good catch of flounder up to about three pounds.  Don said they also caught a lot of throwbacks and that they caught most of their fish on shad and Gulp fishing the shoreline.

We also talked with Joel Ferguson on the water and he found the trout chasing bait in very shallow water on the north end all morning.  His largest fish went about 20-inches and if you know Joel...you know he caught them on Gulp!

This bite has just gotten better every day, but I don't know if it can survive a hurricane. The water was rising so fast today that it would bury the top of a stake-out stik in a very short period of time.  Because the surge is stacking up water already it doesn't leave much room for runoff if we get a lot of rain. 

Water looked bad today, but the fish didn't mind!

You don't know if you don't go.  Gene and I didn't even get started looking until around nine this morning and we limited on redfish on our second stop.  The water was high and dirty in the river and the tide came in all day long.  Both Burton's ditch and Black's were badly off-colored with a lot of dead hyacinth on the surface.

The salinity level was surprisingly good.  Any cut that had small ladyfish chasing shrimp at the mouth was holding not only reds, but some very solid trout and flounder as well.  We only kept five very solid specks and five flounder up to three pounds, but we went through a lot of fish in a very short time.  We would have caught even more specks had I figured out what was going on a little quicker.

Gene stuck with live shad, but things really picked up when I started fishing a Blurp shrimp tail on a Carolina Rig. The flounder weren't crazy about the Blurp, but the reds and specks could not leave it alone.  Gene caught all but one of our keeper flounder on the shad and he put back a lot of undersized fish.  We were going to fish the open lake, but the southeast wind was tough if you got very far off the shoreline.

As dirty as the bayous were, we still saw a lot of shrimp on the surface.  The marsh ponds were dirty also,  but they were just packed with mullet of all sizes.  If this hurricane will miss us and we get one or two strong outgoing tides it is going to get really good in a hurry.  Those were the first 17 to 20-inch trout I had caught in the past couple of weeks and they were a welcome surprise!

Bite still slow.....Ike won't help!

The bite has been slow to recover in both the river and the lake over the past few days.  The water doesn't look that bad, but there is not much happening.The marshes have recovered much faster.  The water doesn't look all that good in some of the ponds, but the redfish are still there.  We ran the bayous and the east side of the lake just checking out the water and we did not see a lot of bait.  The salinity was good, but the bait just wasn't there.

They are still enjoying a very consistent bite on trout at the jetties and in the surf.  The water is really pretty down there and they have been catching size as well as numbers.  I have canceled all parties for this week until I can put something solid together so we will be out covering water tomorrow morning.  It may very well be a waste of time even if we find fish should Ike head our way.  The wind blew the spring fishing out and now we can't keep hurricanes out of the Gulf!

Kind of back on line...I hope!

I am "just kind of" back on line for right now.  Our computer crashed and burned the week before Gustav, my wife hooked up an old lap top that was missing a few keys on the key board, and I did the best I could to meet three deadlines at the end of the month.  I am not sure that this will even make the big screen, but it is worth a try.

                                  They are all the same size!

We fished five days in a row prior to the arrival of Gustav and the redfish were just going nuts.  Limits came quick and easy each day as darn near every fish we caught was in the slot.  We started out catching them on live shad and finger mullet, but by the time we had to pack it in for Gustav, we were fishing nothing but BLURP on a quarter ounce jig head.

We fished today and they were still doing their thing, but it might slow once the floodwater from up the country runs down hill.  There is no doubt that the hundreds of 15 to 19 inch reds that we have caught over the past two years have finally grown up.  We have caught only a handful of oversized fish and the rest of them look like they came out of the same mold.......  almost every fish is 22-25 inches long!

Matt and Terry caught reds this size non-stop for four hours. 

As you can tell from the pictures, I hope I get them on here, we have been living in the bayous and the river all the way to I-10. I have had no reason to run south, but I have gotten some great reports off the jetties and short rigs on trout.  They also said the water was in fantastic shape.

I did not run the lake today, but I did just prior to the evacuation and the water was looking very good again.  It was much saltier than I anticipated.  We did see a few gulls working over ladyfish and for the first time in a long time there were a lot of shad rafting up in the mid-lake area.  I still don't have a trout program going on the north end, but I am not complaining as long as the redfish bite continues.

The Fords caught a pile of reds, but none larger than Kelly's.

Aside from losing other files that my wife says were more important, I lost every email address as well.  If I had your address at one time, I do not have it now.  If you want me to have it, give us a few days to get this computer mess straightened out and send me an email.  I just thought I hated computers before this happened!

Do you have your new Texas fishing license yet?