If you are not from the Valley or have not been down recently, the drought has been extreme.  I regularly travel to Colorado so I drive the length of the state.  And by far, the driest area on my route is Brownsville to Kingsville.  But a couple of good soakers the last couple of weeks will help both our shrimp and our crabs.  Let’s hope that we continue to get much needed rain.

As for wind, normally it doesn’t bother me, within reason.  But after the huge grass kill a few years ago, big winds really limit the areas we can sight fish.  And with high, stained water all over the western half of the bay, sight fishing has been poor.  Also, loads of boat traffic intent on “seeing” fish at full throttle.
does not help the situation.  To this point, the Shallow Sport Owners’ Tournament (aka the worst weekend of the year) is this weekend.  From my experience, it is far more entertaining to get a couple of comfortable lawn chairs and a pitcher of bloody mary’s and watch the launch than it is to try to mix it up with these guys on the water.

For anyone interested in a post mortem on turkey hunting, it was a good year and I think I will expand my turkey hunting next year.  Most of my hunting this year was in Junction and the surrounding Hill Country.  Weather was as inconsistent for turkey hunting as it has been for fishing, but sometimes it is easier to manage while hunting.  Here are a couple of hunting pics – I will post fishing pics this week and will provide regular fishing updates from here on out.

We continue to see largely small fish, with some oversized fish mixed in.  20-25 inch fish are definitely under-represented.  We are also finding a lot of trout, including some good ones, on the backs of rays.  Small trout are also mixed in with wads of redfish, which is typical in the Fall.

Where to fish?  People get really pissy about actually pointing to specific locations (despite the fact that first, I could be a total liar and second, fish are unlikely to be in the same area more than a couple of days in a row, particularly at these water levels).  So the simple way to answer this question is on the margins.  Areas that typically are under six inches of water and are very tough to reach are now under more than a foot.  Also, the fish seem to be favoring grass flats over the sand or mud.  Fishing has generally been better to the south than the north over the past two weeks.  Rattlesnake and North Peyton’s have fish, but it seems like the whole world knows about where they are in there so it gets crowded.

Dove hunting the first weekend of the season was very strong and there have been big numbers of teal, even on the salt water.  This bodes very well for the duck season.

My second observation – even more than in previous years, the Monday-Wednesday pattern of better fishing during the summer months has been in full force.  By this I mean, that fishing on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday is significantly better than other days of the week.  Why?  Every Saturday, we have a tournament, or multiple tournaments.  On Friday’s we get the so-called pre-fish, which could be re-named “the running of the shores.”  As far as I can tell, there is very little fishing going on and a whole lot of running shorelines by idiots on their jungle gym towers.  Saturdays are a zoo with the tournaments and Sundays are recovery days for the fish.  I have no explanation for Thursday.  The net-net is that June-August, I would highly recommend avoiding Thursday-Sunday if at all possible.  As an aside, I asked a guy why he fished in these tournaments.  In front of his $60,000 boat pulled by his $40,000 truck, with a straight face, he told me he needed the money.  Really?

Now for the good news.  This week, on Monday-Wednesday and on Friday morning before the tournament crowd destroyed every shoreline in the bay, the fish were starting to group up and feed aggressively, particularly on the east side of the usual islands.  I fished north to the north end of Peyton’s and east to the far end of the Navy Dumps and found fish relatively easy to pattern and find.  Water temperatures have started to fall, there are tons of shrimp available and we are also again catching crabs in the Arroyo.

To the south, the same shorelines that had been productive in Rattlesnake still have redfish, but the huge trout seem to have moved out.  This week, South Cullen’s to the observation deck was empty, as was the inside of Peyton’s.

All of this bodes well for the Fall.  With fewer boats in general on the water and the end of the tournaments coming this weekend, there is tons of forage for the fish and they should be far less hassled.  Fish that have been pushed to the East side margins will push up on the west side shorelines in large groups.   As always, we have plenty of doves for the opening of that season.

Basically, we have been dealing with really high tides and lots of fresh water.  But on Thursday, the tide began to fall out pretty aggressively and previously empty flats suddenly held fish.  Not that they really wanted to eat, though.  The good news is that for the last two days, there have been substantially more redfish on the flats than in the previous two weeks.  Look for this trend to continue.  The bright spot has been the continued presence of lots of really big trout.

I have primarily been fishing Rattlesnake (find the bait and you will find the fish) and the dumps at Cullens.  Peyton’s has been slow but the East Cut has been very productive.  The east side sand has been very slow.  It seems like this year is starting to resemble last year.  The first half of the season was poor and the Fall was awesome.  I feel like these fish are coming out of their sump and September-November should be great.

Fishing continues to be a challenge with very high winds, even early in the morning.  On the mornings in the last week that the wind laid down, there were plenty of tails and fish that wanted to eat.  I found them both north of the East Cut and south of the Arroyo on those days.  Water levels did come up some this week which at least gave us access to flats that had been too shallow to access.   The last couple of days, there have been plenty of fish on the flats, they just don’t really want to eat.

For the most part, I have found most of my fish to the south of Arroyo, although I did have a good day on a spin trip in the saucer. Big trout continue to show up consistently.  These fish are a numbers game – throw at enough and you will eventually get one to eat.  But it usually takes several targets.  There have also been lots of flounder on the flats, adding to the indisputable body of evidence that limit restrictions on both trout and redfish are yielding positive results.  If only we could do something with the redfish limit.

I mounted a new engine this week on my boat, which I am now selling and spent three hours putting around in the Arroyo towards Rio Hondo doing break in.  I found two groups of baby tarpon in the Arroyo while I was messing around that way.

The fact that the redfish are out in such numbers makes me think that the fishing should really turn on any day.  The winds are strong but at least they are now from the southeast, which is a very positive change.  Hopefully they will begin to die down soon.

As far as my boat goes, it is a Hells Bay Guide 18 with a brand new Yamaha 90 2 stroke.  The price is $28,000.  Please email me if interested.

I can’t recall a time when we have consistently had more shots at trout over 25 inches.  Without revealing too much of my hand, the trout have been pretty predicable which has allowed us to approach them and get quality shots.  Unlike in previous May’s where I have patterned these trout on the sand, these fish are on the west side shorelines.  Also unlike previous years, these fish are eating smaller flies (I wouldn’t call them small but they are not my usual trout flies – deer hair mullet flies that look like bass flies).   Catching of these fish is almost always better in lower light.  Seeing them is easier at mid-day, but that cuts both ways.  No one will convince me that the 5 trout limit is not having a positive impact.  We are seeing more big trout (and also more flounder of all sizes) than I have ever seen before.  Much of this credit belongs to Bruce Schuler in Port Mansfield who took endless grief for his very unpopular stands on the issue.  But he is certainly being vindicated and we all owe him our gratitude.

There are a lot of really small redfish schooled up on both sides.  In some cases, they are almost indistinguishable from mullet, especially from a distance on the sand.  But these aside, there have been good numbers of quality redfish available, particularly along the flats adjacent to the deeper channels.  There are good numbers of shrimp hatching and loads of finger mullet.  As always, find the bait and you will find the fish.  Peyton’s was nearly empty the one day I fished it this week.  The sand has scattered fish  but basically, the further north you go, the more there seem to be.

I still am trying to get some pictures of this, but we a day off trip this past week for one of our guides turned into a sheepshead fest.  After a lot of experimentation amongst a group of us, he went out and caught nine sheepshead on the fly in one afternoon.  He kept 5, which is the limit.  The next day he caught 5 more.  He is clearly on to something.  I will let you know how this ongoing experiment evolves and will post pictures as soon as I get them from his camera phone.

The wind is scheduled to blow itself out this weekend and we should be back to stable, consistent fishing next week.

On the way in we saw some bait busting and I asked him if he wanted to throw a fly into it and he said he did.  As it turns out, it was a big school of ladyfish – he wasn’t that interested so we came on in.

That night he went out to the dock to catch a snook.  There were loads of both shrimp and menhaden under the lights and we could see several snook lined up in a row underneath my duck hunting boat that was hanging in the sling beneath the palapa.  It required a really tough cast with a really tight loop to get to them underneath the boat.  And each time the cast was short, a trout would nail the errant fly.  But he was really determined.  And he was not going to be denied.  About that time, his phone rang – it was his girlfriend calling to see how his day went.

I tell you all this because the conversation that transpired was awesome, even though I could only hear half of it.  I think it went something like this:

Girlfriend: How did your day go?

Bill: It was really fun, saw a lot of beautiful country but I didn’t catch a big trout, even though we saw some.

Girlfriend: Oh.  What happened?

Bill: It’s a numbers game – you need a lot of shots to get one to eat.  But it was weird – every place we should have seen a big trout, we kept finding redfish.  We caught several of those.

Girlfriend:  I thought you liked to catch redfish?

Bill: I do. Just not when I’m looking for trout.

Girlfriend: Well, did you catch anything else?

Bill: Just some ladyfish.

Girlfriend: What’s a ladyfish?

Bill:  They look like a baby tarpon and they jump and make big runs.  But they are junk fish.

Girlfriend:  How can they be junk fish?  It sounds like everything a tarpon does.  What are you doing now?

Bill: I’m sitting out here trying to catch a snook, but every time my fly lands I hook a trout.

Girlfriend: This makes no sense.  You live to sight cast a fly to redfish, but just not this trip, because you want to catch a trout.  You talk about tarpon all the time.  You catch something that looks and acts like one but it’s junk.  Then you catch trout that you spent all day looking for but you sound disappointed.  I thought you wanted to catch trout?  Are these snook even good to eat?

Bill: They’re delicious but we release them.

Girlfriend:  What?

After a couple of more minutes of small talk to his obviously baffled girlfriend, he hung up and started fishing again.  A couple of minutes later he side armed a beautiful cast beneath the boat.  As the fly landed, a 24” snook inhaled the fly, he immediately got tight and somehow managed to land the fish.  As it swam away, he started laughing and asked me if he thought he should call her back.  He answered his own question: “No, she’ll never get it anyway.”  He paused for a second of reflection and added, “I don’t think this has long term potential.”

You can’t make this stuff up.  I love my job.

What I can say for sure is that after the rain the fishing was much better to the South and the west than to the north.  This week, I found good numbers of oversized redfish in really skinny water along the refuge shoreline while in keeping with my theory, fishing along the Westside shorelines in Peyton’s and along the ICW north of the Arroyo has been much slower.  The wading birds like usual are a big help in identifying where the bait is congregated and consequently, where the fish will be.

I fished one day this week out of Port Mansfield.  We were looking for big trout in potholes to the north.  We found a couple of trout but interestingly, the redfish were hanging along the edges of the potholes where you would normally find the trout.  It seemed like every great trout ambush spot had a redfish on it.

The other thing the rain has done is to bring the Arroyo to life.  There are huge schools of 2” menhaden and lots of shrimp. This has brought out the baby tarpon and snook in good numbers.  There are plenty of trout under the lights as well.

My pictures were worse than usual this week and I was fishing with a guy who is an even worse photographer than me!  To prove it, here are a couple of particularly bad ones……

Conditions this week made fly fishing challenging.  Clouds and high afternoon winds have made visibility in many areas near impossible and casting difficult.  None the less, we have found good numbers of both trout and redfish.  On mornings when the wind laid down, the regular lagoons and lakes on the west side have lots of tailing fish aggressively eating shrimp.  As the wind picks up in the afternoon, we have been moving to the east side and finding lots of scattered fish east and north of the Arroyo.  The key to these fish has been finding an edge – a grass line, shore line, edge of a gut, etc. and moving down it.  The fish are hugging the structure.

We did fish one day out of Port Mansfield this week.  We had at least a few shots at large trout and plenty of shots at redfish.  The water on the east side was pretty mucked up.  I have heard report of brown tide in Corpus but I don’t think that is what this was.  The wind and rain chased us off the water by noon that day and we towed back down to the Arroyo and found fish again on the east side until past 6:00.

I have had several people asking me recently about seeing birds.  I have not been seeing the typical gulls over pods of shrimp.  However, the wading birds can also show you the way.  Yesterday we found big groups of fish first thing in the morning mixed in with the wading birds, who were also eating the shrimp aggressively.  THis was up in the Widgeon Hole area which I might add I do not recommend as a wading venue.  Every time I wade there I feel like I am in a mine field full of sting rays.  Be careful.

If you have read my reports in the past, you might remember the one I posted last year about a dog we found on a remote flat.  This time it was less dramatic, but again, I found a dog on a remote flat.  We were poling an edge on the extreme eastern edge of the Lower Laguna.  I look up to see a boat running directly at us, straight down the edge.  I yelled at him, put my hands up in disgust and said a lot of not nice things about him.  About 10 minutes later, we see a huge splash in about 12 inches of water ahead of us.  I look closely and I see a dog running through the water towards us.  We picked the dog up and I begin to put 2 and 2 together.  We flag down the guy I had previously been cursing and return his dog.  The lesson here – if someone is running the flats like an idiot, he probably is an idiot.  But the possibility exists that he has lost his dog, which trumps any behavior.  So just don’t pass judgment until you have all the facts, or you too will feel like an idiot, like me.

The fishing this week was challenging.  The west side was very slow, with the exception of a big herd of big trout that we found.  These entertained us in the morning, but other than that, we only had consistent redfish early when the wind laid down on both Monday and Tuesday. One other note here.  I did run into Peyton’s one morning to see if I could find birds and shrimp.  There were plenty of shrimp but no birds.  The water was way too off color to fish so I left.  But as soon as it cleans up, there should be plenty of action there.  The rest of the week, the majority of the west side was totally blown out and we pretty much skipped out on it and went straight to the east side.

If you have not fished the LLM before, the east side is an expansive white sand flat that extends from South Padre Island to the Land Cut, north of Port Mansfield.   It is one of the most dramatic places I know of to sight fish for redfish. This week, the sand was definitely on.  The key is finding the edge where they are travelling.  Sometimes this is a grass line, a shoreline or some slight ridge or trench.  Once we located it, we had consistent shots from 10 o’clock on every day this week.  Strong winds made casting a challenge and reinforced the advice that every guide will give – you will never regret practicing before you come.  Shots are often quick and you have to be able to load the rod and make an accurate cast quickly.  The right rod, the right line and lots of practice are key.