ENOUGH RAIN ALREADY

Far too many times I have fished just a wee bit too long in a wind that continued to build only to find myself saddled with a long wet boat ride home. Monday, however, was an exception. There was no excuse…..the wind had the neighbor’s flag starched before I ever left the house.

Having enjoyed a super afternoon the day before, I was determined to get in one more shot before the remainder of the week got washed out. The wind was already blowing at a 15 to 20 mile per hour clip when we pulled away from the dock, but I mistakenly thought, “Well, it can’t get much worse than this.”

I was wrong. By the time we boxed the last fish of our limit, the wind had already blown a full bag of plastics off the deck of the boat and was howling at a rate closer to 30 mph than twenty!

Unable to reasonably fish the same water we had the day before, I begrudgingly settled for a stretch of shoreline that offered minimal protection. The only time I attempted to bury the Talon in an attempt to stop a drift, we immediately took a wave over the transom.

We were surfing so quickly, in fact, that it was all but impossible to cast the same She Dogs and Corkies that had worked so well the day before into the wind. On several casts, it was a matter of cast and duck as your lure was coming back at you faster than it left!

The reward for our foolishness was that we found both redfish and trout in the area and they were very solid fish. Most of the reds were either slot fish or larger and our largest trout was a five pound fish. By the time we had won the tug of war with the fish, however, we had been blown a hundred yards off the spot. A redfish using the wind makes for a long drag-testing struggle.

Even though the most productive depth was less than four feet, we were still forced to rig our rat tail Assassins on a quarter ounce head. The bow in the line made it hard to detect even a solid strike, but once you recovered the slack line the war was on. Holding on to the center console and netting a fish with the other is not an easy thing to do, but it worked and was amusing as well.

The weather the day before was completely different. The wind was blowing at an uncomfortable rate, but pretty normal for this time of the year. We elected to wade rather than fight the troll motor all evening and it proved to be a good decision. The surface temperature was a balmy 67 degrees and we had about 18 inches of water clarity which is clearer than anything we normally fish this time of the year.

I was adjusting a strap on my waders when the first trout crashed a Fat Boy and exploded out of the water. Before I could get her in hand, Brandon’s Skitterwalk disappeared beneath the surface and there was the mutual feeling that the trout bite on Sabine had seriously improved. “Two four pound trout at the same time is a new record,” barked Brandon while releasing his fish.

I never changed lures, nor did he, as we continued to catch trout at a slow, but steady pace. Of the fifteen or so trout we caught and released, at least four of them were over five pounds and none were under three pounds. Brandon pulled off an even larger trout that we initially thought to be a redfish until she wallowed across the surface with her yellow mouth wide open.

It was the best afternoon of trout catching that I have enjoyed in the past two years. I was, in fact, growing concerned that we may never catch fish that size in those kinds of numbers again.

Not surprisingly, however, here we are again staring dead in the face of several more days of hard rains if the weatherman is right and he seemingly only errs when calling for no rain or light winds. It may well be flooding by the time you open your paper, but take heart in the fact that the trout fishing is once again alive and well on Sabine Lake!