Colburn's Sabine Connection

Sabine lake early.......Bassmaster Open late!

The last two days have been a little different with the Bassmaster Open taking place in Orange.  I don't know how far north or west they are running,  but a lot of them are headed that direction each morning.  I would say more are turning north up the Neches, but there are enough headed south to really crowd the Taylor's bayou area.  Most of them said the mornings have been better than the second half of the day and it has been thee same for us.

I haven't fished past 11:00.  One day the birds worked for us and the next day we couldn't find them.  The trout we caught under the gulls were 15 to 17 inch fish, but there were lots of them.  The next day we ran to the shoreline when we couldn't find any birds and kept 11 flounder and four redfish.  it wasn't crazy good, but I have done a lot worse.  We didn't have a single keeper flounder that we had to measure.

The wind has not been much of a factor early.  The water continues to clear and i have seen more shrimp on the surface than I have seen in a while.  Giles Smith and Percy Williams were one trout short of two limits and they were fishing a Vudu shrimp under a cork.  I haven't fished the Vudu in a while and that obviously was a mistake.  We caught our trout on a bone diamond Assassin and a bream Lil John.

Jonathan Simon and Trey Smith, both of Orange, made the final cut and will be two of the 12 pros fishing the final day of the Open.  A win will get them in the Bassmaster Classic.  Kudos and good luck to the home boys tomorrow!

Runoff hasn't slowed bite....yet!

At least for right now it looks like I will give it a break for the weekend,but we enjoyed probably the most consistent week of catching that I have had in a long time.  We ran south early in the week to avoid the results of last Sunday's flooding and found both flounder and trout in the ship channel. We caught all of the fish on the same 4" tails and finally discovered that depth was more important than color.  We fished an outgoing tide everyday.

Believe it or not, as bad as the river looked, much of the north end of the lake, all the way to Madam Johnson Bayou, looked really good.  We found fish under the birds, both trout and redfish and they were pretty solid fish. The closer we got to the west side of the lake the worse the water got so we never even fished it.  That may have been a mistake as I talked with several fishermen that did well on the redfish over there both Thursday and Friday morning.

Our second flounder Thursday was over five pounds and two of our flounder Friday were nearly that large.  Our better fish came out of the ship channel, but we found flounder almost every stop in the main lake.  The water was high and the fish were in the grass. Most of the bird activity was on the south end.  The jetties have apparently been a good option as well, but not consistent.  I hope that the river doesn't muddy up more of the lake, but at least for right now there is a lot of good looking water!

The SRA is running both generators, but has decided to not open the gates as of today.  The lake is above pool level, but has slowly started back down.  Hopefully, they will continue to generate and slowly pull the level rather than dump it on us all at one time following storms north of the lake.