Colburn's Sabine Connection

Wasting some beautiful weather!

Every once in a while I question why I even fish, but it is even more frustrating when you get weather like we have had the past two days and still do poorly.  We ran the entire lake, caught a few small fish around the cuts and in the river, but never got on anything really solid.  The water is in great shape, but it is still high and that always makes it a little tougher.

The birds were very scattered and we never saw any work at all which did not help matters.  I did see one other fishermen( there weren't many folks out) just wreck the trout until I got tired of watching him.  He waved me in, but I never joined him for two reasons.  The first being that my hat was off to someone that found a school of trout like that in the middle of no where with no birds around. 

I also felt that he more than deserved to reap the benefits of his good fortune alone.   My boat occasionally draws a crowd and one boat can turn into several boats very quickly.  With no birds around, I knew that he had them to himself as long as they would bite.  I didn't know the gentleman, but he e-mailed me last night and said that he was running south of the separator when he saw one shrimp jump.

He turned around and shut the big motor down and started fan casting the area.  His patience paid off.  He tried several colors and made a ton of casts over a 20 minute period before he saw another shrimp jump.  For the next three hours he steadily caught trout from 16 to 24-inches long.  I watched about 30 minutes of the show before leaving.

He also said that was the second day in a row that he had found fish that way .  The day before he found them about a 1000 yards off the north revetment wall.  Tuesday his fish bit better on bone diamond, but the fish Wednesday wanted hot chicken.  He added that he had not caught a keeper red either day.

I have talked with several teal hunters that said they weren't surprised that we were'nt finding a lot of reds in the open lake.  They said the flooded marsh ponds they are hunting are just packed with shrimp, shad and huge schools of reds. 

Sooo.....I am thinking for right now your best bet is to idle around looking for a shrimp or two skipping across the surface while praying for a couple of back to back days of howling north wind.  Hunting a few gulls working is tough, but hunting a shrimp jumping in 140 square miles of lake is even tougher! 

  

Feels a little more like Fall each day!

We got one in yesterday just ahead of today's north wind and while we didn't just kill the fish, we did catch both trout and redfish from east pass all the way to the Causeway Reef.  The water was in great shape all over the lake, but still very high.

A pair of 10-yr. olds wth a pair of solid slot reds!

I had a pair of ten year old fishermen and their Dads and the kids more than held their own.  We caught our fish early on Sea Shads and Flats Minnows fished under Kwik Corks, but we put the corks back in the box once we found a few birds working over mixed schools of small trout, sand trout  and slot reds.  Most of the fish had shrimp whiskers sticking out of their mouths even up on the north end of the lake.

The only place we saw a lot of bait activity on the surface was the mouth of Willow Bayou, but the fish just weren't there for us.  The tide was pouring in early and running out equally hard by the time we called it a day. The water in the bayous was still high today, but the north wind did help some with the high levels.  The current in the river has also slowed some now that they have quit lowering the lake level on T-Bend.

If the wind doesn't prove to be too much of a factor tomorrow, I expect to see a little more gull action all over the lake.  It was also nice to find the reds schooled up in the open lake again as they have had no reason to leave the flooded marsh grass.

Great conditions and a pretty good catching day

We had a perfect day to fish yesterday.  The wind was lighter than predicted and an overcast sky made things downright pleasant.  We didn't keep a lot of fish, but we caught keeper size trout, reds, and flounder almost every place we fished.

Even with all of the fresh water pouring into the lake the fish have not made any significant move thus far.  We started out fishing drains on the east side of the lake, water visibility about a foot, and caught trout reds, and flounder until the incoming tide slowed.  A swim bait and tails fished under a cork did the job...dark colors worked the best.

When the tide all but died, we ran to the south end and caught our best trout of the day schooling under scattered birds.  Opening Night and hot chicken tails rigged on 1/4 ounce heads proved to work the best for us after catching only smaller trout on several other colors.  Around noon we ran over to the north revetment wall, but gave it up quickly as we were instantly covered up with love bugs!

From a boat fisherman standpoint, it was nice having the entire wall to ourselves ever since Ike destroyed the road.  The new road is open once again (they should use the same outfit to work on I-10) and the bank fishermen are back in business. We'll have to share the wall once again, but it pleases me that they have access to a first class fishing hole.

The wall is not an option for everyone, however, as you have to be agile enough to walk the rocks bordering the lake to take full advantage.  If you can do that safely, you have a legitimate shot at catching not only numbers of quality fish, but the largest trout of your life as well.  As a rule, the folks fishing live shrimp under a popping cork catch the numbers even when we are doing poorly, while the largest trout still eat a topwater or suspending lure fished parallel to the rocks.  Anyway....good for the bank fishermen! 

We finished the day fishing the river for less than an hour as I wanted to see if the Toledo Bend draw-down had finally washed out that bite.  We made two very quick stops and caught reds, specks, and sand trout so I guess the answer is "no".  The water is more off-colored and the current is tough to deal with, but the fish are still there.   

South end was apparently better than the north end today

Unlike yesterday, which was hot and windy depending on where you were trying to fish, today was hot and calm.  We found more fishermen than specks on the revetment walls, but the trout we caught were very solid fish up to five pounds.  We saw a respectable number of trout caught by the bank fishermen fishing live shrimp under a cork, but the average size didn't appear to be quite as good as the fish we were catching.

Our fish were right against the rocks, but the live shrimp fishermen were catching most of their fish about 10 to 15 yards off the bank.  When the Mirrodine/ Catch 2000 bite slowed down we switched to Swim Baits and tails and caught a few slot reds at the base of the rocks in 5 to 7 feet of water.

We did work three sets of birds on the south end, but never caught a  keeper fish under them.  The best bite of the day took place when we found 2 gulls sitting on the water off the south revetment wall just north of the pocket.  We were not keeping fish, but I would guess that we caught and released a dozen 17 to 20-inch trout and 4 reds that would have kept before we left to make a meeting.  Its always nice to leave the fish biting!

We caught those fish on a Hoginar and a Texas red Sea Shad.  My brother fished the north end of the lake and said it was tough.  He also fished the river and said that it looked like the draw down on Toledo Bend was starting to muddy things up.  He was more concerned, however, by the numbers of dead shad stacked in Adam's Bayou and the off-colored water at the DuPont Outfall. I got two calls about all of the dead shad, but I have no idea what caused that. 

  

A consistent bite that will do for now.

I sat down to write this report last night, but thought better of the idea due to a local company tournament scheduled for today.  Last year my next door neighbor ( he works for this company) and I fished the afternoon before just to give him some idea of where to fish the following day. He does not fish saltwater and up until a year or so ago fished very little.... period!

We were out no longer than three hours, but it was long enough to cause him a year of grief.  The following day he won the flounder division after catching an even larger flounder the day before with me. I posted the picture of that flounder in my column for the paper and it proved to be a picture he could have done without.  Lots of hoorahing.

In his defense, what the rest of his co-workers didn't know was that we also released a 7-pound speck and a nine-pound red that same afternoon that we caught off just two different spots.  Had he won all three divisions he might have been forced to seek work elsewhere.  He's on his own today so we will see how it goes!

I absolutely wasted time and gas money two days this week opting to fish Calcasieu.  I found some small rat reds, who can't do that, and caught some small trout under the birds, but nothing worth leaving Sabine for.  Yesterday the wind was light early and I decided to run Sabine again with no particular game plan.

It proved to be one of those rare days when you think, "I should have started here," at every stop.  I caught a limit of 2 to 3 pound trout on the very first stop.  The tide was coming in and schools of shad were riding it into the the ICW off the north tip of Stewts.  I initially thought the lady fish were blowing holes in them, but it proved to be trout.  I caught every fish on a dayglow Corky Fatboy, but I think they would have hit anything.

I then ran over to the La. shoreline and saw the only 2 boats I saw in the lake all morning.  I caught two slot reds and a solid flounder on a spinnerbait and returned to the river to see if the flounder were still eating finger mullet.  They were'nt for me, but I did catch just a ton of very decent sand trout and 8 or 10 nice specks vertically fishing in 17 to 22 feet of water.

I had every intention of going in at noon, but I had to first run east down the ICW to avoid a fast moving thunderstorm.  Rather than just sit there, I started throwing a swim bait up against the rocks and I have no idea how many baits I lost or red fish I released over the next two hours.

The water is beautiful in the river and looks good enough in the lake, but the bite in the lake is still tough for me. You cannot plan your day around one bunch of specks huddled up on the end of one island and that is all I found.  The river is getting pressured to death right now and producing great catches of small fish on a number of patterns.  There are obviously some solid fish there as well, but they are not just running the banks looking to commit suicide.

Hopefully the lake will turn back on as soon as we get some of this water pushed out of here. I hope the tournament goes well for my neighbor and his co-workers!

Flounder and reds taking up the slack!

I fished both Wednesday and today and they were basically carbon copies of one another.  The bayous, ICW,and the river are in great shape and full of shad and finger mullet.  A northeast wind pretty much limited us to fishing behind the islands and the La. shoreline.

We never found anything positive in the open lake, but we did well on both flounders and redfish in the cuts, the bayous, and the river.  The flounder bite has been very good for the past week or so, but I have seen very few people taking advantage of it.  Spinner baits, GULP, and tube jigs worked better around the cuts on the La. shoreline, but finger mullet and shad have worked better in the river and ICW.

We are catching a pile of very small trout in the river, but keepers are scarce.  The redfish bite both in the lake and in the bayous has been solid, but a lot of those fish are in the 16 to 19 inch range or over sized.  That has not been the case with the flounder.  I would guess that no less than 70 percent of the flounder we have caught have been in the 15 to 19-inch class.

Limits have come pretty quickly and we quit fishing for them as soon as we limit rather than taking a chance on killing fish we are not going to keep.  If it indeed gets as cold as it is predicted to get this weekend and the wind blows some of this water out of here......look out.  You would not believe how many reds are still up in the backwater ponds chasing all of that bait around.

I don't know about Cow Bayou, but if you launch in Adam's, watch out for the floating logs and 2x12's hidden in the wall to wall duckweed.  I don't know where all that debris came from, but it showed up today and we had to idle all the way past the DuPont docks going out.  It was better coming back in as the hard stuff was easier to see with the duckweed sucked up against the bank.

Don't forget that your Texas fishing license has expired.  You know there will be a lot of traffic on the water for the holiday weekend so have fun, but be extra careful!