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.