More Questions Than Answers

I am assuming it could best be compared to the weekend golfer that has already exceeded 100 strokes and is yet to even tee off on the 18th hole. His goal at that point has been lowered to simply finishing a miserable morning and selling his clubs. He then somehow magically birdies number 18 and suddenly can’t wait to play tomorrow!

Larry Mosely asked if I would like to catch a few slot reds he’d found on the north end of the lake and he didn’t have to ask twice. Not surprisingly, they never showed up and he was ready to get back home and mow in less than three hours.

One more drift, however, not only made the day, but left us wondering what the heck was going on as well. We were fishing the revetment wall and apparently doing it all wrong by casting too close to the rocks. We decided that we would make on more drift with our casts landing no closer than forty feet from the rocks.

It wasn’t exactly a case of our having figured something out as the only two fish we had seen caught were by anglers walking the rocks and casting out as far as they could. In the next twenty minutes we caught seven trout in the 16 to 18-inch class!

I hadn’t caught five keeper trout in a single day in the past three months. While we were both excited, the happening left us with some obvious questions. Have those fish been hanging a little deeper all this time? Was it the lure or the color of the lure? Was it the speed of retrieve? Did we just stumble up on a small school of better fish?

There was a time not that long ago when seven keepers would have been considered a poor day of trout fishing on Sabine Lake. Was this the beginning of something good or did we just luck out?

We were throwing a lure that I have not fished in a long time because L.J. was uncomfortable throwing a Softdine for the first time. I tied a chartreuse Catch 2000 on for him and he boated three fish before I could switch as well.

Those fish just crushed the 2000, but would not hit a tail or a Corky. Neither of us elected to volunteer and try another color so we could not eliminate the possibility of color making all the difference.

The Catch 2000 is a suspending lure that sinks very slowly and without exception, our strikes came when the lure was about four feet beneath the surface. We caught those fish in less than a fifty foot stretch of shoreline so there was no doubt that they had shrimp or shad or some type of bait cornered up.

We were only able to fish that program about thirty minutes as L.J. got an unexpected call requesting his presence at home, but we had seen all we needed to see. I never reached the point where I was contemplating selling all my tackle, but I can’t wait to get back on the water and

help the fish answer a few questions.

With the exception of folks fishing south of the Causeway and beach fronts, a large percentage of local anglers hoping to enjoy fried fish have turned to chasing reds almost exclusively. That could be a mistake judging by the results of the Sabine Pass Lion’s Club tournament last weekend.

It was a flounder only event and a total of sixty-three anglers gave it a shot. When all was said and done Ryan Neff blew the field away with a whopping 6.38-pound flattie. Very few anglers have ever been fortunate enough to even put their hands on a flounder that size!

Easily the most encouraging aspect of the event was that the top six places all went to contestants with fish over the three pound mark. A little more cool weather and lots of folks will be catching lots of flounder.

We recently found good numbers of twelve to fourteen inch trout bouncing tails of the bottom in both East and Middle Pass. We were fishing the breaks in ten to twelve feet of water. I think you could have caught them on a variety of colors, but we fished only a purple demon.

Lots of bites and lots of small fish on an outgoing tide, but we never caught the first Texas legal fish.