Hooked Up: August 2024

I hope this August article finds you high and dry…with only the amount of rain needed to keep the garden up. The tropics have made for an interesting summer, and some crazy fish patterns.

Tropical storm Alberto gave us a much needed surge of gulf water into the Laguna and Baffin. This push of water diluted the brown algae bloom in both bay systems, but especially the Upper Laguna. Baffin also benefitted although there is still a hint of brown in many parts but structure is now more visible, allowing for smart casts versus just flogging the water for a lucky bite.

At this time, Beryl is tracking toward the southern tip of Texas and should give us another flushing on top of our already improved water clarity. The whole scene down here is looking up. Shortly after Alberto we fell into a very solid, and almost predictable big trout bite. Believe me, it was and continues to be most welcome. If history has taught us anything, these storm surges will prove beneficial in the long run.

If you are blessed to fish 25% of the days I do, you know how hard it is to get that “perfect day” where everything falls into place from the tide, barometric pressure, feed periods, actual bite, etc. Conditions have been really solid for us and I’m filing no formal complaints. Saying that, the same tropical weather events that are flushing our bays of the manmade brown algae are making it a bit more challenging on traditional wading areas we are accustomed to fishing. If you find yourself down here and get out of the boat in what should be knee-deep water under typical conditions, it may now be waist-deep or higher due to storm tides. Check before you bail out!

So the million dollar question is: What does this do to the fish? Well, the short answer is it scatters the hell out of them. Saying that, there will always be those sweet spots that they group up in and still provide for tremendous fishing opportunities. As a wade fisherman, some of these sweet spots may be too deep to access, so you may have to do it out of the boat or do more scouting than normal until you find them piled up on a shoreline. These areas do exist but, again, it takes more time to locate the trout you thought you had pinpointed. Be patient and enjoy the adventure of fishing new grounds.

Common sense and deductive reasoning would make you think that everything would want to be along the newly flooded shorelines, including the baitfish, and some certainly will be. In other bay systems with back-lakes and deep drains, that may be the case, however, I do not find it here as much as you might think. I do not pretend to know the answer but our baitfish seem to routinely get out in the deepest parts of the bays during these events. Miles of gorgeous sand-grass mixed shoreline will be just void of mullet. Of course, if there is nothing for trout to eat in all that gorgeous water, so you can bet your last nickel that what you are pursuing is not there either. So many days we have tried to force the bite where we wanted it to happen, only to come up empty-handed. You get in the boat to find another location and 500 yards offshore you will run through the motherlode of mullet. I see this all the time and have been making this observation for longer than I can remember. Inevitability, we will shut down in what seems the middle of nothing and be catching trout of all sizes within minutes, proving the oldest theory in bay fishing: Find the food supply and the predators will be close at hand.

This high water will lift much of our live and dead grass off the bay floor, so expect to see plenty of it suspended and floating. Bringing your line in with a ball of salad on the end can be frustrating, but consider this; most of the grass you are picking off your lure is mostly what has gathered on your line during the retrieve, and has only gathered on the lure at the very end. Point being is that most of your retrieve is well under the floating stuff and working as it should. Don’t let it get in your head as it only fouls your lure at the very end of the retrieve.

Remember the buffalo! -Capt David Rowsey