On Galveston: August 2007

I wish I had a better report but right now it is looking bad around here. We are flooded locally and all the way up the Trinity watershed to Dallas so we don't even know for sure what's coming. We are in our fifth day in a row of drenching. I have not been on the water in about three days. You have to pick your days where you can get out and get back in safely. We have freshwater running from every little brook and stream, anywhere and everywhere. It will take more than a few days to get this fresh water out of here.

Prior to this pounding fishing was had been a mirror image of last month so I'm going to write this as though it was still going on. The Galveston Ship Channel is yielding the best catches. All up and down the channel, in the spoil banks and the deep reefs, they are holding the best concentration of trout right now. Redfish are spotty. They are never in the same place two days in a row. They are just moving all around. Everything is very disturbed right now. We have been working the channel, slicks, tide lines, shell humps and the sand bars out there. The depth has been about 6-11 feet of water, changing daily.

Bass Assassins and Texas Trout Killers or Gulp, any dark color rigged on a 3/8^th ounce jig head are working out real good. Most of the fish are hanging out down on the bottom but once you get them going good they are coming up and once the baits hit the water you are on. Not much bird action going on with the exception of East Bay. They have a little bit of bird action happening but there is a lot of junk under them, a lot of sand trout and small specks.

In East Bay from Hannah's Reef all the way to Frenchy's Reef, they are all holding good schools of fish. The fish are primarily trout but there are a few reds hiding in there. The shorelines are still yielding some pretty good catches on topwater all throughout East Bay. There are a few flounder being caught off of the shoreline on soft plastic however the trout are taking the topwater, which is where we are getting our better ones. The best of them are coming in around six pounds, no trophies but very nice. I had a man that caught one a few weeks ago at seven and a half but for the most part we're just getting good solid fish in the two to five pound class just about every where you want to fish.

It is quite crowed and miserable at times on the weekends. It is almost unbearable out there especially if you want to fish a reef. Just about every reef in East Bay and the Galveston Ship Channel will have about thirty to forty boats over them. There has been some good stuff happening over at Dollar Flats. Dollar Flats has been holding some good fish if you are out wading in waist deep water with topwaters. They have been some pretty solid fish in the twenty to twenty-five inch range, weighing about three to five pounds. Dickinson Bay has been pretty good on redfish; however I do not know how it will hold up with all this rain. Dickinson Bayou is probably dumping really hard just like Clear Lake and everything else. I just don't know.

Everything will be running way behind for our fall fishing pattern with all this rain. If it quit raining right now Trinity Bay might be fishable by September. That is how bad it is. Like I said, we have a lot of water coming from Dallas via the Trinity River. All the upstream back bays that we like to fish this time of year and on into the early fall will be affected by either the Trinity or the San Jacinto. We're hoping that when the rain quits East Bay will hold for us and we will have a good August, time will tell. Stay dry and hope; that's what I'm doing.