The View: July 2023

By now you are probably sweating profusely in the July heat. I love it – summer in Texas. Yeah, the boiling temperatures and draining days get old, but it is what I have known all my life. If you can endure our blistering summers, fall is only a weak cold front away.

Our summer fishing in the Matagorda Bays has its ups and downs. More ups than downs, though, so long as southwest winds don’t linger too long. July has a tendency to provide lower than normal tides; southwest winds play a role in this. However, July also has a partiality to light winds that often give us a calm, green surf.

The good news is our fishing has been very encouraging for most of 2023. We are enjoying the fruits of our conservation labor since the Freeze of 2021. Still, we have to do more. It seems that much of the rah-rah displayed on social media to make our fishery better after that massive killing freeze has been forgotten. Not by all, mind you, just those slinging dead fish pictures across internet bandwidth to encourage prospective clients to purchase a date.

We have done so much to bring our fishery back from the dark days of that deadly freeze, only to forget our goal when better quality speckled trout begin to show more regularly. I put most of the blame on our charter captain industry. We are the pros, but some of us are acting like amateurs. We have to be the beacon of light and promote the balance of give and take of our fishery.

We know that fewer trout hitting the ice can do nothing but improve the quality of our catches. It has been proven during the past two years. Ask Matagorda captains, ask Baffin Bay captains - Catch and Release Works!

Honestly, I didn’t believe our fishery could bounce back this fast with only eighteen months of reducing daily bag limits and increasing the keep-slot lengths. It has been a joy to regularly release two-pound, 16.5 inch trout back to Matagorda Bay, knowing we all are responsible for better trout in our bays.

Several times in June we have caught and released easy limits of trout while drifting with soft plastics. You may say, “that’s no big deal.” Well, actually, it is a big deal. It tells me a whole lot about the state of our fishery. During the decade prior to the ’21 Freeze, it became increasingly difficult to catch trout on lures in East Matagorda once water temperatures rose above 75°. What we experienced in June tells me we have more fish today than we did back then.

We enjoyed this kind of catches in the 90s and early 2000s. Then, I believe, we began to overfish our resource and the results of our catches proved it. Hence, bag limits dropped from 10 to 5, and now down to 3. It is pretty simple to me – we control our own destiny. Yeah, I love eating trout, but I love catching bigger trout on topwaters and releasing them back to the bay a whole lot more than hot grease.

A recent study determined that the population of Texas is growing at the rate of 1300 new legal citizens a day. Our population is booming and our bays will continue to see more and more anglers. And, that’s OK, just as long as we release a lot more than we take.

It is time for guides and outfitters to step up and do the right thing. Step up, be a professional. Quit selling fish. Sell a great time, sell customer service. Sell a how-to-become-a-better angler type of outing. Sell a safe, happy, family-friendly morning on one of Texas’ greatest natural resources. It is just good business.

If we keep debiting our account we are going to go broke.

Sunrise Lodge and Properties specializes in fishing, hunting, vacation rentals and coastal real estate. We would be happy to offer any advice that might help you enjoy Matagorda.