Colburn's Sabine Connection

Wind making it tough!

I had some determined, but reasonable folks this morning and we surrendered to Mother Nature pretty quickly. The bayous haven't been good to me lately and there was no where to hide in the open lake. I only fished three days this past week and every one of them was different.  I think that if there was anything consistent it was that the terns and a few gulls worked over slot reds and decent trout in the afternoon.  The mornings were tough on us every day.

The water clarity, in spite of all of this wind, has held up pretty well and we fished a lot of 63 to 65 degree water.  Our best trout ate Fat Boys and Maniac Mullets, but tails produced better numbers.  The water was as low as I have seen it this year and it will probably get even lower by the first part of the week.  I also can't recall seeing this many small shrimp in the lake, but I am hoping that will change with a strong north wind this weekend.

We are not catching as many flounder any more so that bite may be winding down.  The fact that we are finally seeing some larger trout, however, is encouraging.  We haven't caught anything over six pounds, but a fish over 8 pounds was caught off the north revetment wall Tuesday.  That fish reportedly ate a chartreuse Catch V!

 

Runoff hasn't hurt bite too badly thus far.

Dr. Norman drove in from Nacogdoches and we squeezed in a good redfish trip last Friday.   That was only hours ahead of the weekend monsoon and we beat up on the redfish pretty good.  We also had a couple of better than average trout which pleased me more than the redfish. but I was happy just to get the trip in and even catch fish.

Wind and colder weather didn't slow things down ahead of monsoon!

i wasn't expecting much Tuesday afternoon, really hoping just to see how much water clarity we had lost with all of the runoff.  It really depended on where you were fishing, but most of the north end of the lake was still in good shape. The dirtiest water was west of what's left of Sydney Island. Very much to our surprise, we caught more trout in one evening in the five pound plus class than I have all year long.  Our best trout was right at the six pound mark, that's just a guesstimate as we didn't take time to weigh them before putting them back.

We still split fourteen keepers in the three pound class and i would say we released at least 8 fish that were five pound class trout.  I have been very concerned about fish that size as I just haven't caught any in quite a while.  We caught every fish on a dayglow Fat Boy and a pearl chartreuse Maniac Mullet. Yesterday, just ahead of this rain and north wind, Gene and I made an afternoon run.  The lake was a little more off-colored, but still not too bad.

Reds were still doing there thing yesterday.

We never found those same fish, but we did keep a pair of nice trout and the reds were crushing tails and Usual Suspects.  I was going to hit it again this morning until I heard a lawn chair blow up against the patio door.  I am almost afraid to believe that we may start seeing more big trout on a regular basis, but this is encouraging.  The folks over at Outcast Tackle in Groves said Usual Suspects could get a little hard to find for a while as H & H in Baton Rouge took a big inventory hit in the flood!

I don't think the cold will hurt the bite as bad as the wind will over the next few days.  The water temp was in the high 60"s yesterday.  Every fish we cleaned, both trout and redfish, was just full of small shrimp and we fished only the open lake.  I don't know if the big trout were eating shrimp also, but we saw very few mullet or shad.