Colburn's Sabine Connection

Not again!

After two mornings of far better catching than you would ever have expected, we are now bracing for whatever Harvey will bring our way.  At this point it looks like we will just get a world of unneeded fresh water for the next few days, but this hurricane still has time to swing our way.  By the time it is over we may be strolling for white perch in Sabine lake.

This marks the fourth consecutive year that we have had some type of major rain event screw everything up.  I am even more concerned as to how much rain Toledo Bend will get as they have been over the 171.5 mark for  a while.  If they have to throw the gates open again we will get water from both directions!

We got wet the past few mornings, but caught the heck out of reds and a few solid trout.  We never ran farther south than Willow Bayou.  Knowing that bite was going to get washed out a day or two later was tough to take.  i have talked with several guides from Galveston to Matagorda that were tied down and leaving  this morning.  They said they were currently getting more rain than wind, but it won't be long before that changes.

Be careful!  Don't take any chances with travel plans and pull the drain plug if your boat is parked in the driveway!!

Good bite and an even better Banquet!

They really packed it out at the Orange County CCA Banquet last night and it was a great ending to a very good fishing day.  We found fish virtually everywhere we fished yesterday.  The trout were mixed in size, but we found some really nice flounder and the redfish were still doing their thing provided you were in the right place at the right time.  We did not see the big schools of surfacing reds that we have been seeing.

It was flat and hot all morning with one storm that narrowly missed us. The redfish were apparently letting the ladyfish do all of the work.  About every fourth or fifth pod of shad was getting hustled by both reds and ladyfish so there were a lot of wasted stops.  Any time the first fish caught was a gafftop we moved.  Swim baits and Hoginars worked the best.  We caught most of our trout fishing the Louisiana shoreline and drifting the flats in 2 to 4 feet of water.

The day before was just more of the same, but we stayed wet after about 10 o'clock. It just poured!  Our trout were larger Wednesday and the keeper ratio was better.  We also caught most of our fish out in the open lake.  Usual Suspects (Chartruese-fire tail and cock of the walk) and Vudu shrimp under a cork both worked well.

i have cleaned a lot of fish in my life, but Wednesday I found a small banded water snake in the stomach of a 3 to 4 pound flounder for the first time.  It must have just finished messing with the wrong flounder as it looked  like it could have crawled off the cleaning table. We caught that flounder drifting the shell in 3 feet of water at least 200 yards off the shoreline so go figure.

I have seen a lot of tower boats running in and out of the Game Reserve all week long.  I am guessing that they have a tournament this weekend.  the river bite is improving as well, especially for redfish, but most of them are oversize fish.  Everything is finally setting up good for us in spite of all of the local rain, but i am holding my breath with the lake level on the high side on T-Bend.  If they get the rain that we have been getting above the lake we could get washed out again!

 

 

Way more rain than expected!

Lord only knows what the long term effect of all this rain (more to come) will be, but much of the lake was gin clear all last week.  We canceled this morning, but I talked with two groups that elected to give it a try.  One group found the flounder and redfish right off the bat, but yielded to one of several monsoons very quickly.  The other group fought it until noon and limited on redfish.  They also had five flounder and seven keeper trout.  They caught all of their fish on a morning glory Usual Suspect fishing scattered shell in 2 to 4 feet of water.

They said they never saw another boat after 9 a.m., but you couldn't even see the front of the boat much of the time.  Thank God for the ol' GPS. The worst part of today's storms was the fact that they included some bad lightning.

We really got a lot of rain in a hurry today.  Hopefully, most of these storms will miss us tomorrow the water clarity will improve.  Because a lot of the shad have been in the dead middle of the lake, the redfish bite should hold up.  We'll see!

Don't forget about the Orange County CCA Chapter banquet at 6 p.m. Thursday night in the Orange County Convention and Expo building on hwy. 1442.  Can't beat the steak dinner and they have some super auction items.  See ya there!