Hometown News For Orange County, Texas
Hometown News For Orange County, Texas
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I discovered this past weekend that there is something even more challenging than fishing two tournaments at the same time and that is trying to cover both weigh-ins! As it turned out, I had to bale early on the Cops Helping Kids weigh-in as I have been working John Thomas’ O.C.A.R.C. event for the past 25 years and I wasn’t going to be late for this year’s edition. Jim Morrissey really did me a solid by emailing me the final stats for the Cops Helping Kids Tournament. I can...
I am thinking that you better arrive at your favorite boat launch early Saturday morning if you plan on fishing anywhere between Bessie Heights and the jetties. Contestants in both the OCARC tournament and Cops Helping Kids tournament will be vying for parking spaces and enough room to make a cast! The OCARC has hosted their annual fishing tournament the first weekend in August for a kazillion years, actually closer to 25, so that their patrons would never have to ask about...
I spent the past week running the roads between Jasper and Houston and there wasn’t a ditch or low lying field that wasn’t under water. While no one is complaining after last year’s drought all but dried up the impoundments across the state, most of that runoff will have to exit though Sabine lake via the Sabine and Neches Rivers. Thus far, it hasn’t washed out the incredibly good bite that we have enjoyed for the better part of a month, but it is still raining today and the f...
The results from last Saturday’s Triangle TailChasers tournament were a good indicator of just how hot the fishing on Sabine has been over the past few weeks. The local anglers that fish this circuit work for a living and are fortunate to squeeze in an afternoon or possibly even one day a week to scout out a winning pattern. Add to that the fact that they are looking for reds, trout, and flounder and the challenge is even more daunting! Twenty-one of the twenty-eight teams e...
Lawrence Delino had just strung another fat three pound trout before I headed his way with a bottle of cold water. After stopping long enough to get a backlash out of his son, Jay’s, reel I continued the short wade in the thigh deep water. I was scanning the shoreline looking for mullet on the surface when I heard him cut loose with an R rated expletive. When I looked up he was just standing there staring disgustedly in the direction of the LNG tanks some 16 miles to the south...
THANKS FOR TUNING IN Texas burns under 100 degree heat. This could be the summer that high temps set an all time record. The good thing is that as long as high pressure dominates, it will keep hurricanes away so don’t complain about the heat. Back in December, the experts were making the talk show circuit and predicting gas at the pump would go up to $5. Creaux and I said, “Not so.” We predicted that gas prices would fall to $3 and below a gallon by September. A lot of people were blaming President Obama for the high gas p...
David Legget opened the lid on the front storage box of my boat and reacted as though he had uncovered a snake. “This looks like a grave yard for empty bottles of Bullfrog sunscreen!” Some of them were in fact empty and ear marked for the garbage, but I store both empties and full bottles in a plastic shopping bag that had obviously not survived my inattentiveness. I learned long ago that most every brand of sunscreen will eat up everything from reel seats to upholstery so I t...
Anywhere you go along the gulf coast there is an unwritten standard by which all fish are judged, the magic mark that each angler strives to attain. For inshore fishermen the glory fish that causes anglers to stop and take a second look has got to be a trophy speckled trout. A bona fide 30” class or 10 pound trout is the fish of a lifetime for the coastal plugger. Fish in this class take on almost a mythical existence, just ask any serious trout angler about a fish of this m...
ELECTION TIME WILL SOON BE ON US I was just thinking about the disadvantage Republican Primary candidates have to face with no presidential race and how that will cut down the turn out. If the Primary had been held in March, with Santorum and Romney battling it out, there would have been more interest and excitement. The local GOP candidates are working hard but to create excitement is costly. Those that don’t spend the money will be left behind. Money moves the masses. Mitt Romney is not a great candidate yet he will be t...
SKEETERS, SCHOOLS AND HIGH GAS PRICES So far it’s been one of the mildest winters that I recall. It hasn’t been cold enough to kill the bugs and we have again been invaded by large “Skeeters.” The pests are so numerous that if you open your mouth you’ll suck in a load of them. If it continues we will have to escalate the spraying. Kids can’t go outdoors, parent’s fear they will be carried off and eaten up. Our school administrators across the state become more upset every day for the condition Gov. Rick Perry has put our e...
With no cover to run to or time to run from a driving rain that escalated from a slow drizzle to a monsoon in a matter of seconds, we wedged the bow of the boat up against the south bank of the ICW to wait it out under the overhanging cane and tallow tree branches. It was far from dry, but we were out of the wind and that was apparently good enough for two other fishermen headed our way in a fourteen foot aluminum boat as well. We were all wearing rain gear and were more irked by the conditions than the minor discomfort, but...
The traffic, which had been crawling at a snail’s pace in the westbound lane of Interstate 10, came to a standstill ten minutes ago. Drivers were becoming very impatient, with many of them coming out of their cars to take a look at what was happening further up the road. The weather was cloudy with winds gusting, but the temperature still didn’t feel like December and a week from Christmas. I rolled down my window and found out the culprit was a construction project less than a mile up the interstate. A rotund fellow wit...
In today’s highly specialized world of tackle and gear it seems like there is a bait for every individual situation. Lures have become so refined that the consumer cannot possibly ever catch unless they have a pocket full of cash and camp out at the local tackle shop. Now it’s one thing to have to worry about saltwater tackle and it’s quite another thing to worry about freshwater tackle, try worrying about both of them at the same time. Anglers on the upper coast of Texas are...
HISTORICAL HEAT AND DROUGHT The temperature reached 105 and was over 100 for the first five days in June. What makes it worse is that it hasn’t rained in months and the wind has gone down to a zero breeze. Monday a little rain finally came. Some folks got up to a couple of inches including a good amount of hail. Most of us got only .5 of an inch, enough to wash the dust off of the leaves. We could see the dark clouds to the south and east of us and prayed it would come our way but all we got was the over spray. For 38 years I...
DRY WEATHER, EASTER AND NEW JUDGE The moon is big and bright after being full Monday night. Good Friday and Easter arrives this weekend. The drought I talked about a few weeks ago gets worse by the day and no relief is in sight. Family gardens will suffer and crop yields will be off if rain doesn’t come soon. People should have sense enough not to burn with the dry, windy conditions but believe it or not, some people wait to see if Judge Thibodeaux will tell them not to. S...
In all honesty, had it not been for a great visit with some guides that I am lucky to see once or twice a year, the $10 parking fee would have been a waste of money at last week’s Houston Boat Show. Most of the boat manufacturers were represented, but there was little else to see in the way of new fishing tackle, lures, etc. The crowds may have been waiting on the final weekend, but attendance also appeared to be very poor up until that point. Capt. Charlie Paradoski and C...
TWENTY-TEN ENDS TWENTY-ELEVEN BEGINS The year 2010 has not been an easy year for America. The country was on the brink of a deep depression, the auto industry, GM & Chrysler, faced going under, which would have had a domino effect with citizens throughout the country waiting in bread lines. Large banks and mortgage companies had over extended in the last decade and were in deep trouble. When the year started, the country had lost eight million jobs, unemployment reached nearly 10 percent. Today, as we face 2011, the country...
I found out the other day that going Christmas shopping with a bunch of females isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. There’s more lolly-gagging and visiting than there is buying. I took a detour at the mall and opted to watch a long line of little boys and girls tell the department store Santa what they wanted for Christmas. Some were wide-eyed and eager while several had to be coaxed by a parent to climb onto Santa’s knee and tell him what to bring on Saturday. Suddenly, Santa stood up and pointed in my direction and said, “I k...
My first real deal encounter with striped bass was close to 15 years ago on the Sabine River, Capt. Dickie Colburn and myself were out scouting for an upcoming trip and we found much more than we bargained for to say the least. On a very popular stretch of the Sabine we came upon a huge group of gulls working over schooling fish chasing shrimp. Immediately we thought speckled trout and began to catch good solid keeper fish on nearly every cast. After landing several fish we...
GARRETT, BARBAY AND MOVING ON Two weekends in a row high school football has taken a blow. First the sudden death of 17-year-old Reggie Garrett, Jr. and the untimely death of Newton coach Curtis Barbay, 68, on Saturday, Sept. 25. Never before has the death of a local person drawn so much national attention as the passing of Reggie. So far the cause of death has not been officially determined. The first report didn’t show anything obviously wrong with his heart. As I write this Baylor Medical Center has been asked to do m...
This year’s Orange County Association of Retarded Citizens’ fishing tournament fundraiser is from 5 p.m. Friday, Aug. 6, to 6 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 7. Prizes range from $25 to $250 – altogether a $2,700 payout with 31 winners – with the big money in divisions such as speckled trout, redfish, flounder, bass, white perch, catfish, croaker, grinnel, rough fish and gar. Only redfish from 20-27 inches are allowed. Weigh-in is at 6 p.m. Saturday at the OCARC, 905 W. Park Ave. Most co...
A WRAP UP Well, the elections are over with until the big general election in November. In the cities, school boards and port elections last weekend there were no surprises. Even the defeat of the incumbents in Vidor was expected. In Orange, Mayor Brown Claybar was sworn in for his fifth term. Brown has been an effective and unselfish leader, often at the expense of his business and health. This will be his final two years. The revamping of downtown should well be on the way when he leaves office. ***Theresa Beauchamp,...
It was all set up a couple of weeks ago that when the fire truck on which Santa was riding in the Orange Christmas parade reached a certain location, he was going to give me a copy of his proposed route he plans to take on the night of Dec. 24 and some of the gifts he would be delivering. But alas! the annual Orange Christmas parade was postponed at the last minute due to inclement weather—not rain mind you, but snow of all things. This really threw a big monkey wrench into the planning of our annual Christmas Korner with t...
I’ve known very few people more colorful than Ed Lovelace. When he arrived in Orange from Port Arthur and bought the local radio station the city was loaded with colorful people. It was a time when businesses were independently and locally owned. Ed blended in perfectly with the likes of Oldsmobile dealer Claude Brookshire, Neal Miller and Jimmy Conn, furniture store owners, Lutcher Stark, Judge Sid Caillavet, Sheriff Chester Holts, Joe Blanda, local barber; Frank Zeto and C...
Fishing too fast is a common problem that many anglers have, especially when the fish tend to gather up and school in big bunches. Saltwater anglers who chase schooling fish along with freshwater fishermen who also key in on flocks of birds over hungry groups of stripers, hybrids, and whites are perhaps the worst. The frenzied activity puts everyone on the boat in high gear often leaving the majority of the water column untouched. It’s a proven fact that smaller more a...
