I'm going to apologize in advance for not really having any pictures. My Iphone just doesnt cut it for what I'd like to capture. But, I have ordered a new lumix waterproof camera, I really liked the older one I had so that should be in hand next outting.
Fishing wise, me and 2 buddies traveled down to the ULM area to get in some water time. I have made several trips since my last post, but not since the heavy flooding in central Texas. I knew we needed to target a lower bay area away from any rivers. This meant my recent go to spot would be out of the question, but I had done a little exploring of a new spot my last trip that fit the bill in the ULM, so that's where we headed.
Fishing wise, me and 2 buddies traveled down to the ULM area to get in some water time. I have made several trips since my last post, but not since the heavy flooding in central Texas. I knew we needed to target a lower bay area away from any rivers. This meant my recent go to spot would be out of the question, but I had done a little exploring of a new spot my last trip that fit the bill in the ULM, so that's where we headed.
After traveling down a rough dirt road we reached our launch at about 530. The wind was really calm, the mosquitos were surprisingly absent, and the water looked smooth as glass, slack tide. Unloading all of our gear I thought to myself, " Oh, it's gonna be a good day.".
We paddled across a flat and to a shoreline just as the sun began to peak above the horizon, allowing us to start scanning a grass shoreline for the reds we were after. The water on this flat was 6" max and the grass was thick, both in the water and on the shore. There was a lot of bait activity but we didnt locate any reds the first hour. We then made our way to the outside shoreline of this flat where we saw a lot of activity maybe 50-75yds from the shore. We staked out and waded this shoreline throwing tops and some buggs. I caught two undersized trout on a super spook jr in bone, and had several missed bow ups, some of which convinced me there were some larger trout yet to be had. About 100yds down the shoreline we were wading was a boat of 5-6 other anglers, looked to be a guide. During the hour of wading this shoreline we saw them catch one keeper trout before they loaded up and headed out. We got the cue as well as the blowups began to become fewer and fewer until it died. The spook jr I was throwing was the only one they were really hitting, my buddy had a spook and they didnt much care for it, they were keying in on the smaller of the two, also leaving the bugg alone. I had switched out the hooks on my spook to singles, I had read where guys were using bait hooks, but not finding any at Academy I went with octopus hooks which looked pretty similar, I was happy with them even though they rode perpendicular to the lure. Fish didnt seem to mind and it kept the grass off of it really well.
We spent the next few hours, at this point about 10, cruising grasslines looking for our elusive reds. One of the guys had a few bumps on a buggs, but we didnt connect with anything. We slowly drifted these grasslines allowing the wind to push us as just the right speed. Me being the "I cant sit still" type of fisherman ended up getting separated from the other 2 guys. They found me about an hour later. I had drifted to a large cut off this flat which emptied into the bay. At this point it was about 1230, knowing the morning bite was over I usually pack up and head back. I never have much luck with a mid day bite, but my two other buddies were staying in corpus with their better halves, so we were going to stretch it out a bit today. We decided to staked out on this cut, caught some bait and stretched out legs for a bit. A bit was our plan, but with a cooler full of beer it turned into 3 or 4 hours. We soaked live/cut mullet, live/cut piggy, shrimp, crab, just about everything you can think of. Now, I'm not really a bait guy, but every once in a while we just enjoy hanging out and shootin' the shit, fishing hard for the morning bite then enjoying the weather and conversations with a drink and some bait, it had been a little while since we had all caught up. It was also one of the guys first time kayaking in the salt, so me and brett really wanted to put him on something and figured this was our best bet next to drifting the flats. Well, that bet didn't pay off as the only thing he caught was a Chris Christie sized hard head.
There were a few guys down and across from where we were on this cut fishing with some kind of live bait. Suddenly, we hear some shouts coming from there way as we were knee deep-thigh deep wading this gut, "You guys better hang on to your rods, gonna be some real action over there in a minute". "Sweet!" we said to eachother, thinking they started to get into some fish (they were fishing the mouth that emptied into the gut and the tide was rolling in slowly). "Shark! About this big!" they yelled with their hands apart showing it was about 3 or 4 feet long. I'm not sure if it was the buzz or we just didn't care, but we just stayed there in the water hoping maybe he wanted some mullet and not a leg. The new to salt guy wore a shore sleeve Magellan out, but me and Brett, knowing better, had long sleeves, knowing it's much better to protect yourself with clothes than sun screen. By about 4 he was looking pretty toasty, so without any real fishing going on we decided to head back in. We had talked to probably 5 groups of kayakers and several boats, there was a red and trout between them all. One gentleman we talked to on a kayak said that because of the full moon and the low pressure the fish weren't really feeding in the morning/afternoon. I'm not sure about the science behind that, but it seemed to hold true for that day at least. Despite us not really getting on any fish, the weather couldn't have been any better and the company was good. At the very least, I also look at these trips as good educational moments. I'm a firm beliver that that more you fish an area the more success you will have as you learn it's patterns and structure. This is definitley an area I will be concentrating on in the future. With some camping trips and others in the works in the upcoming couple months, I see a fishy summer in the making.