TROPICAL STORM THREATENS LOCAL FISHING

Having turned down the offer to hunt fish on Sabine lake the day before, I refused to pass on yet another offer the following day.The fact that it was steadily raining when David Landry pulled up in front of the house with his new boat did little to sway our decision!

“One day we are griping about the heat and then it’s raining too hard…..no way,” said Landry.“At least it will be cooler and I want to check out the new boat before running to the lake.”

After thirty years of tournament fishing and running around the lake at 70 mph, he recently decided to downsize to a rig that required less maintenance and would work in the marsh as well Toledo Bend.There’s a world of difference at the gas pump,” he offered, “but my only complaint thus far is where to store a dozen rods and fourteen tackle boxes.”

Not surprisingly, he left all but two rods at the house and had only a handful of lures in an HEB shopping bag.“The grapes were on sale and everything else fit in the same bag!”

I quickly ran back in the house and grabbed a handful of Bass Assassin Lit’l Tappers and four inch Centipedes in a couple of colors.“We will catch fish with these,” I promised.

We had barely cleared Adams Bayou when we stopped to check on the size of the bass beating up on a small school of shad.We moved shortly after catching five or six fish that wouldn’t even make the twelve inch mark.

I held my breath as he slowly negotiated the ship graveyard at the mouth of Conways and we managed to bounce his new lower unit off a submerged block of concrete only one time.The bass weren’t there, but sixteen to eighteen inch redfish were in a feeding frenzy.We stayed much too long simply because it was fun getting a strike virtually every cast.We had initially planned to fish Cow bayou from one end to the other, but wasted too much time playing with the smaller fish.

I say that, because the first bass that hammered Landry’s crankbait in Cow Bayou weighed at least three pounds.His second fish would have been a keeper as well and I was already losing confidence in my Wacky rig when a slot red just crushed it.

“I don’t want to keep any bass,” shouted Landry, “but I would like to keep a couple of redfish.”We put it in the livewell which had been overlooked in the rigging process and you guessed it…..we never caught another redfish.

David eventually switched to a chatterbait in an attempt to keep pace with the bass racing to eat my Lit’l Tapper and the score was 13 to 6 when he called in the dogs and asked for a worm.Because we were only keeping score for the hell of it, I gave him my Lit’l Tapper and switched to a four inch Centipede.

When all was said and done, he rallied and beat me thirty-nine to twenty-four.However, with the exception of his three-pounder, I just killed him in the big bass category.I had five fish in the two pound class that pulled darn near as hard as a rat red!

Easily the two best colors in both worms were green pumpkin and watermelon gold flake.Even though a world of small bass were continually taking advantage of the shad buffet, we caught virtually every fish near the bottom in three to five feet of water.

If you have yet to try rigging the Wacky worm on a one-sixteenth or one-eight ounce jig head you are missing something.You can rig it weedless or with an open hook depending on the amount of vegetation or cover.They make a jig head designed to fish the Wacky worm, but we are using the same 2/0 wire hook that we use in saltwater and it seems to work just fine.

As if the trout fishing has not been tough enough, local saltwater anglers are keeping an eye on the tropical storm currently parked just off the coast.This one has the potential to deposit a lot of fresh water before leaving town...

The lake has cleared up a lot and the salinity is currently solid enough to support trout, so we may be close to seeing things turn around.You don’t know if you don’t go!