Colburn's Sabine Connection

You have to really love fly fishing!

We called off today due to a most unfavorable weather forecast.  At least for now, however, it isn't a whole lot worse than what we have been fishing every day.  A 20 mph wind is the rule rather than the exception, but we were guaranteed some pretty serious rain and lightning later on as well.

The wind was not that bad until noon yesterday and we really had a good time.  Holly Landry was in from California to visit her Mom and she emailed me looking for a spur of the moment fishing trip hoping to do a little fly fishing.  The fly rod thing was an expensive habit recently acquired in California, but she grew up right here in the Golden Triangle and she's a U.T. grad so she'll be okay over the long haul.

The wind was not doing Holly and her fly rod any favors! 

She is chock full of determination and persistence. First of all, there is no way that I would work my tail off with a fly rod and a tiny clouser while someone on the other end of the boat, (make that way on the other end of the boat) is hammering the fish every cast with soft plastics.  Secondly, in spite of how close we tried to work the birds, we had no stripping basket or cover for the deck and the wind wrapped loose line around everything from the troll motor to Holly.

 
One of several nice fish she caught and released after switching over to spinning tackle.

There is some serious ducking and dodging taking place when you are trying to drive a fly into a 15 mph wind, but she stuck with it until she finally boated two solid specks. She was still hard at it when I handed her my rod with an irate redfish on the other end.  The fly rod found its way into the rod locker at that point and she caught and released her own red and specks on the more forgiving spinning gear for the next three hours.

Everyone is catching fish under the birds right now, but the difference in a good and a great trip is locating the better specks.  If you can get your lure in the water you are going to limit on redfish, but that has not been the case with trout.  We have done very well on 17 to 20 inch trout on the last two outings with longer plastics.  We have also been catching the best trout from mid-lake on south when the wind allows.

Yesterday we did much better with darker colors and lighter jig heads.  Any time our lures made it to the bottom we caught either a sand trout or a redfish.  The better trout were in the top column of water and I am sure we could have done equally well with topwaters.  Black's was still in pretty good shape, but Adams' and Cow Bayou, the ICW, the passes into the lake and the river are very dirty.

You may have to work a little to find solid trout, but if you are into catching, it can't get much better than it is right now! 

You just shoudda been there!

I hadn't even gotten my boat in the water this morning when Kevin issued the following warning, "You may be fishing in the perfect storm by noon. Its coming up from the south and down from Huntsville and they are going to collide on Sabine Lake"  He missed it by thirty minutes!

 
We were almost back when it really got bad! 

It was dark and getting darker when we shut down under the first flock of gulls and a howling east wind wasn't helping matters.  That said, our first three casts produced two solid trout and a slot red.  Before I could put them on ice my phone was ringing and I figured someone at home had been watching the weather.

"I don't know where you are right now, but it can't be as good as where we are," said Rusty Frederick.  "We are on the south end and the birds are everywhere."  Now, it makes no sense running even further from home in 3 foot seas with a killer front headed your way...especially when you are already catching fish.  That said, we left after boxing a few more trout as I had to see what could be better than what we had going on.

I never saw Rusty, but he was right...it was even better.  As a matter of fact, I don't know that I have ever seen it any better than it was for the next four hours.   You can't do any better than a strike on darn near every cast, but the average trout was much larger.  Color didn't matter and they didn't care how fast you retrieved your lure.  If your lure ever made it to the bottom more often than not you were going to have to deal with a slot red.

It was worth getting a little wet. 

We released far better fish than we kept earlier, but no one was complaining.  Johnny fished a group with me Friday following Thursday's downpour and we were really concerned when a north wind was doing its thing at daylight.  Once again, he ran further south and called to tell me they had found some redfish between the whitecaps.  Johnny can find birds on East Bay when he is fishing Sabine!

We caught and released redfish all day long and finished with 5 limits of reds and 29 trout.  Unlike today, we had to measure many of our keeper trout and at least a jillion that we did not keep.  We have been catching lots of small trout and I was getting a little concerned that there may be a scarcity of solid fish this fall.  After this morning, I do not think that is a problem.

My only concern now is that all of the rain up the country will eventually run down hill and we are downhill.  The water clarity has already suffered a little and the surface temperature was back below 70 at noon. As good as it is, I still hate fishing the birds, but it may be the only game in town until the weather lines out!   

You can beat the wind with a little luck and a lot of casts!

The only difference in this morning and the past three days is that is is a little darker and starting to rain a little harder.  The wind has howled all week long, for the most part out of the east.  The approaching front is not going to help the river any as it has gotten a little dirtier every day. The salinity level is still okay, but the clarity is shot for the time being. The water temperature climbed from 68 Monday to 72 yesterday.

I fished Monday with Gene and his son, Jeff, and even the river was white capping by 7 o'clock.  There are those days when you just cannot get it right and that was one of them.  We worked small flocks of birds all morning and caught a lot of fish, but I spent more time measuring trout than casting.  That had not been the case even on the windiest of days, but every once in a while...!

We finished with a decent catch that included only one slot red and that was even more frustrating.  We missed a few others, but limits of reds have been easy to come by. I think our ratio of keepers to throwbacks improved as we worked our way south.

Lewis Williams would not hear of postponing Tuesday and I am glad that he was so persistent.  We got everyone rigged up before we ever left the dock as the wind was blowing even harder than the day before at daylight.  Wouldn't you know it.. the first flock of birds we hit yielded 3 solid keeper trout on 3 casts and it never slowed down.

We took another beating and, not surprisingly, saw only one other boat in the mid-lake area after 11 o'clock, but it was too good to quit.  We easily lost more reds than we kept as they would pull off once they worked their way around the bow and into the wake of our high speed drifts.  At times, we were holding onto the rod with one hand and the handrail with the other, but no one was complaining. It was a bluebird day, but there was too much spray blowing off the waves to shed the rain jackets!

Because it was so rough, the birds would sit in the white caps, get up just long enough to hustle a few small shrimp and sit down again.  You could run to them if you could still find them once they sat down and still catch fish under them.  Any time they stayed up for any length of time, the action was non-stop on both trout and reds.  If we could not spot another group of birds we would make another drift through the same area and occasionally find the school again.  You never got many casts per drift!

The water in the lake is as silted up as I have seen it in the past two weeks, but it did not bother the fish.  We switched to longer plastics and eventually fished nothing but limetreuse.  I caught a couple of slot reds on Hoginars, but spent most of my time keeping the boat in the right place and netting fish.

It looks like we are going to fish a north wind tomorrow with cooler temperatures.  I never though I'd cuss an east wind on Sabine, but I am ready for something out of another direction with a little less velocity.

Football and fall fishing....can't beat it!

The front blew through and I am cleaning up tackle, changing out hooks and respooling reels as this is the last chance I will have prior to a full week of fishing starting Monday.  Keeping your own tackle in order is one thing, but keeping it up for four fishermen can be a little daunting at times.  Eight rods, at least four of every hard bait MirrOlure makes in a lot of patterns, Zip Lock bags full of corkies, tupperware containers crammed full of line and leader material and a box full of jig heads that is only marginally lighter than my starting battery.

This morning I hope to dry things out, fill in the gaps on colors of Assassins, and change out rusted treble hooks.  An eight-pack of tails doesn't go very far with four fishermen. This entire weekend will be devoted to a two-day reunion with old college team mates that may not even recognize each other after 40 years.  That really doesn't matter as 90 percent of the team were full-blooded coonasses and the other 10 percent were "wannabe coonasses" which means we are all at least a cousin or will by the end of the weekend. Les Bon Ton Roulet!

It has been a crazy week of fishing.  I started out with an eye toward the weekend praying for a front to roll in and by the time it got here I was more than content with what I had.  A south-southeast wind got progressively stronger ahead of the front, but the fish were doing their thing. The water cleared up as fast as it dirtied up last weekend and we just hammered the fish in the lake for three days.  The birds were working all over the lake and it was as easy as it gets.

Bill and Brian Bommer cashed in on the unreal redfish bite!

Some days you had to work several flocks to find keeper trout, but every group was working over small trout, sand trout, blue fish, and reds.  Brian Bommer and his brother, Bill, fished with me one day and we could not get away from the slot redfish.  We would leave birds as soon as we caught and released another red only to find the same thing under the next flock of birds.

The next two trips were spent in the river looking for trout in deeper water after limiting on redfish in the lake.  The first day we kept 16 trout up to 4 pounds, but the following day we caught more small trout and kept only 3 flounder, 9 trout and limits of reds.  Yesterday I fished the Neches and did not do well at all.  The water was a little dirtier than it is in the Sabine (I didn't check the Sabine) and I have just started trying my deep water jigging program on the Neches.  I think it will be every bit as good as the Sabine, but I fortunately do not have much time to explore right now.

If this front is strong enough to blow some water out of the marsh and sustain a 5 to 8 degree surface temperature drop, the fall bonanza will be in full swing.  The only thing missing right now anyway are the big trout and they will show up very shortly! 

Mother Nature - 2....Dickie - 0

It is cool and looks like we may get even more rain today, but there was hell to pay to get rid of that horrendous south wind.  I just thought Thursday was tough with gusts up to 30 mph, but the water was still in pretty good shape and we managed to get bit a lot, even if most of the trout were small. 

We fished both live bait and plastics and caught fish pretty much everywhere we could fish.  We even found a few birds working over small trout in East Pass, but that didn't last long.  For the most part, I fought the wind with the troll motor while Wes and Ralph fished as best they could.

Wes caught and released this slot red in a semi-protected stretch of the bayou. 

This was a CCA trip that Ralph bought at the Beaumont banquet earlier in the year and they had no intentions of keeping any fish, but I would guess that we easily went through 50 fish over the course of the day.  I would also guess that only 7 or 8 of the trout and one slot red would have kept anyway.  We found one school of trout in the mouth of a bayou and they caught a fish virtually every cast until the tide slacked up a little.

 
No dock and no launch at daylight and the water was still rising! 

I thought the water was as high as it could get even with the big southeast wind and incoming tide until I arrived at the dock the following morning.  There was no launch visible, the docks were all under water and the wind was blowing just as hard as the day before.  While I would never have expected to find the water up in the parking lot, I did try to cancel the trip Thursday night, but they still wanted to give it a try.

We found one short stretch of fishable bank on the ICW under less than two foot waves and caught a handful of small trout on Swim Baits.  Other than that, it was absolutely impossible.  We tried to vertical jig a few deep holes on the river and I could not hold the boat in place long enough to get a lure to the bottom.

The only good thing that happened was that we got back to the landing maybe 15 minutes before the wind switched to the north and it started raining sideways.  Cow Bayou, Adams Bayou, and the river were dirtier than they have been in a while, but it won't take them long to clear up with this north wind.  A lot of water has to go elsewhere before the bite under the gulls that was getting so good picks back up, but there are still plenty of fish in the river and bayous.

Not surpisingly, while I spent the morning burning gas and impersonating a guide, a pair of Pt. Arthur anglers managed to outfish Mother Nature's ugly ways. Someone always does! 

I talked with them at Academy this morning and they said that they got off the water about an hour too late yesterday, but it was worth the soaking.  They were fishing one of the cuts leading into Bessie Heights off the Neches and they kept 2 limits of reds, 3 flounder and 13 trout.  They said the fish started biting around noon and they caught all of their fish on mud minnows. 

High water, high wind, and unseasonably hot!

I squeezed in a few hours today looking at some different water.  I wanted to fish the lake, but the wind was howling by the time I got out.  The water clarity was still pretty good in the river, but the water was HIGH and never released with the weak outgoing tide.

I lucked out running back into the river and stumbled up on several small schools of reds chasing finger mullet right up against the bank.  I very nearly ran right past them due to the whitecaps.  I probably caught and released 12 to 15 fish that were in the slot.  When they slowed down, I switched to a bone diamond Sea Shad and caught four very solid flounder in the same area.

I never fished any of the old haunts and spent way too much time fooling with those redfish, but if that ever fails to excite me I'll quit guiding that day.  I found trout on only one spot out of a number of stops and caught 6 fish up to 3 or 4 pounds bouncing a Hoginar off the bottom.  When they quit, I checked out one or two more spots, never got another strike, and ran back in to take care of business.

When the water is as high as it is right now and unseasonably warm to boot, the fish get very mobile and just don't stack up like they will after a few fronts.  It is supposed to blow like heck tomorrow so we probably won't fish the lake again.  We can still catch quality fish in these conditions, but I have to be lucky to find any numbers.  It still beats mowing the grass! 

A fishing trip long over due!

We managed to get our yards mowedFriday morning before it rained again and Johnny Breaux and I hit the river around noon.  We had just about as much fun as you can have in one afternoon.  We have only been next door neighbors for 30 years so we figured it was about time he came fishing with me!

 
Johnny Breaux with one of several nice trout taken off the river.

He had to fish a little tournament Saturday and I don't know how he did, but the fish are there to be caught.  I caught a 6 1/2 pound trout on the third cast with a Sea Shad in 17 feet of water on the river and the bite never really slowed down after that.  We hit several spots in case one may fail him the next day and the fish were everywhere we stopped.

 
And a big flounder to boot!

We caught one 4-pound trout in about 8 feet of water on a 10w-40 Assassin, but all of the rest of the fish were deep.  We left each spot right after catching a fish or two.  Johnny caught his first big ol' flounder on a tail right before we quit so he was in good shape for the next day.  I got in late this evening and haven't gotten a report, but I know they fished in the rain this morning.  I am going to walk over there right now and see how he did!

I don't know how much more rain we can stand before it starts affecting the bite, but it is good right now and the water has not muddied up much.  We fished an outgoing tide all evening. 

It just gets better with each front!

We gave it a brief shot yesterday, but the wind just blew out everything we had fished the day before.  I think it was partially due to the wind, but we gave up a little water clarity in both the lake and the river and that may well be some runoff finally catching up with us.

We woke up to cooler weather than I expected Wednesday morning, but it was a beautiful day following the modest front and rain the night before.  Scot Moore and Jeff Callens drove down from Bullard and we were on the lake at daylight. Rather than settle for the bird in hand, I elected to run to the south end in spite of a stiffer than expected east northeast wind.

I had gotten several good reports over the past week, but just could not make myself abandon a sure thing closer to home.  The birds never worked hard, but there were at least a few birds working the entire time we were there.  The wind made it really tough to set up on them and we undoubtedly fished through them much too fast.

Scot with a solid trout off the river

We caught a few keeper trout and enjoyed one good school of slot reds, but other than that we caught mostly small trout.  We stuck with soft plastics and the size of the jig head didn't seem to make much difference.  Color didn't make a lot of difference either as we caught them on everything from glow-chartreuse to Morning Glory.

We pulled out at noon even though I knew it had been an evening bite and made a pass through two of the bayous and the river.  Not surprisingly, we caught our best trout of the day and finished the evening tripling on schooling redfish that had the shrimp pinned up against the bank.

 
Jeff and Scot closed out the day with a pair of slot reds.

We got a big rain last night, but I had another test postponed so I am going fishing anyway.  I'll let you know how it goes tonight or tomorrow morning depending on how late I fish!