Colburn's Sabine Connection

We're back on line again!

I was surprised to get back home from a weekend baseball tournament and discover that my blog program was finally back on line.  I really thought that we had lost it for good and I hated the thought of losing a lot of that information.

I don't even know where to start, but we have dealt with some big wind over the past two weeks.  This past week, however, was much more user friendly with the exception of one very poor day.  The flounder bite has been above average, the trout are doing their thing when you can get to them and the redfish have started schooling earlier than usual.

The flounder bite has been very good in spite of the wind.

 We limited on trout, reds and flounder on a trip early in the week and I haven't done that in a long time.  We have caught flounder on the revetment wall, the Louisiana shoreline and in Black's Bayou.  We haven't done much experimenting and pretty much stuck with a Gitzit, 3-inch Usual Suspect and Gulp.  The outgoing tide has been a little better for us than the incoming.

We have caught the bulk of our trout on a She Dog, 4-inch Usual Suspect and Diedappers rigged on a 1/16th ounce head.  We did have one very good day drifting in 3 to 4 feet of water with a VuDu shrimp under a cork and a 4 inch Gambler Flappin Shad.  White and roach were our best two colors.

Most of the redfish are a little too big!

The only problem that we have had with the redfish is that most of them are a tad over the 28 inch mark.  We limited almost every day and we might have had three fish under 25 inches all week long.  Apparently a number of the teams fishing the Tailchaser tournament this past weekend experienced the same thing.  They fish a 27-inch maximum length and they released a world of oversized reds,  Less than a pound separated the top six teams when all was said and done!

Bill won the tug of war and used up his tag on this one.

After canceling several trips due to weather I finally got Joe Matthews and Bill Blizzard on the water and we had a very good day.  Bill's first fish on a new rod was an oversized red that proved to be a stiff test, but Bill eventually won the tug of war.  Joe carried us early on the trout catching and caught his share of the reds as well.  It was summer time hot and still!

The southwest wind is whistling right now (8:00 at night) and supposed to do the same tomorrow, but we are still going to give it a shot.  We probably lost a little ground on the water clarity, but you don't know if you don't go. Hopefully the wind will hold somewhere around the 10 mph mark.

Rescheduling was a better idea than fishing with me!

This has been a less than memorable week on the water for me.  I rescheduled all but one trip and suffered through three trips without clients.  If you were one of the groups that agreed to reschedule....be happy, happy, happy. The week began with us catching a few nice trout in a stiff southwest wind Monday that went to pot quickly when a frigid monsoon arrived sooner than expected.  We beat the lightning back, but it literally rained in sheets!

Tuesday felt more like February than April and I never took off my sweatshirt or Frogg Toggs all day yesterday.  I was shocked at daylight to find a thin coat of ice on the boat and windshield of the truck.  A light east wind turned out to be far more than that (what a surprise) and while Capt. Belcher and I covered a lot of territory just looking, we kept only three fish for supper.  I spend a lot of miserable hours trying to fgure out what the fish are doing when they are not doing anything!

As you would expect following three days of big winds, the water was just stupid dirty from East Pass to Greens and all the way across the mid-lake area to the Revetment wall.  You couldn't see a pink Corky two inches beneath the surface early, but there were patches of clearer water (six inches of visibility) by the time we left.

I am cleaning reels and changing hooks on topwaters today with one eye on tomoprrow's weather forecast hoping that it doesn't snow.  The surface temperature was 59 to 63 degrees everywhere we fished so it is just a matter of the silt settling out and a little less wind before we will be right back in the game.

Wind - 3....Me - 1!

The past two days have been anything but a bargain after Mother Nature granted us a one day reprieve on Wednesday.  The south wind hasn't matched Tuesday's big blow out of the north, but it has been hard enough to eliminate a lot of productive water for us.

We literally ground out a few fish yesterday and I was blessed with three very good fishermen or we would have finished with a big zero.  We caught a couple of fish off the revetment wall before getting blown out and just made do the remainder of the day drifting a small stretch of shell over and over and over!

As it turned out, the Swim Bait was our most productive lure and it didn't have to do much to earn that honor.  By the time we called it quits we may have had two to four inches of water clarity at best.  With much the same wind forecast for tomorrow I am hoping to reschedule.

The long range forecast for next week doesn't look a helluva lot better at this point.  Some of my better areas on the river and in the bayous are making for a poor Plan B due to all of the fresh water currently being released out of T-Bend.  The brightest news from an otherwise difficult week of fishing was that  a creel survey taken Thursday in all of that wind still yielded possibly the best flounder catch that they have ever recorded.  Some of the best surveys have occured after the coldest of winters over past years, but this one tops them all.

My group hasn't made that final call on tomorrow's trip yet, but I won't be making a scouting run if we don't fish.  I can handle wind and I can handle dirty water, but the two of them together take the fun out of even hunting fish with no pressure.

Bite was pretty good today in spite of lots of ugly water!

After two poor days in a row we caught a break with the wind and managed to put together a very decent box of trout today.  We struggled Monday and I really don't know why only to just get blown away yesterday in gale force north winds.

We found very little water that had more than six inches of visibility and we covered a lot of water.  The big wind and a strong outgoing tide combined to really silt up everything on the east side of the lake. The water was so blown out that launching was a problem at most of the ramps this morning. We caught our fish on four inch tails, Vudu shrimp and usual Suspect Swim baits.

Toledo Bend is on a two gate 24-7 schedule right now and it is going to take the fish on the norht end a little while to make the adjustment.  That is a lot of fresh water running down hill through Middle and East Pass.  This might concentrate the fish on the Causeway reef, but the water clarity will have to improve to find out.

It looks like we will have to deal with a south wind tomorrow, but hopefully the water will clear up a little over night.