More rain than bites!

After missing a good weather day yesterday, I got bluffed out of fishing this morning.  I sat in the truck drinking coffee for thirty minutes waiting for it to quit raining and finally gave up.  It isn't raining right now, but i think its a trap on Mother Nature's part.  The catching has been hard enough for me over the past ten days, so I don't feel like i am missing a great deal.

After two tourgh scouting days, Johnny took a chance and pulled a trip Friday.  He spent more time casting than catching most of the morning, but finally found the reds schooled up in one tight area and finished with three limits of slot fish.  He said they buried the Power Pole and fished one small area the whole time.  The reds would quit biting, move a few yards and start again.  I would have undoubtedly left the area when they moved the first time!

On my better days, which were rare last week, the reds found me more times than I found them.  With one eye on the weather I was reduced to fishing stretches of shoreline hoping to find small groups of slot fish pushing shad.  Any time you saw them blow up or push a wake, all you had to do was reach them with most any lure.  We fished topwaters, a Lil' John under a cork and a four inch Swim Bait.

I ran into two guides last week that had a dozen or so trout in the box, but not one trout was Texas legal.  They are launching on the Louisiana side in order to keep the Louisiana legal trout and salvage a few trips. The water on the east side of the lake still looks better than it does on the Texas side.  There is a lot of muddy runoff and dead vegetation in both rivers.

I haven't caught enough flounder to return to fishing them exclusively like I once did, but I have caught some very nice flounder while chasing those reds on the shoreline.  The only problem is that we are about to enter the two-fish limit phase and i wouldn't want to pay a guide fee for two flat fish.  That reduction has worked well thus far in helping the flounder rebound, but it doesn't help book many trips.

My inability to locate keeper trout does not mean that if you find yourself in the right place at the right time on the right tide that you can't catch a few keeper trout.  Just don't count on them being there tomorrow!