On Galveston: March 2007

Not really too much excitement to report on here; if I had to use just one word to describe the weather I'd say, "Horrible." We started February with a few days of sunshine and it looked as though things would warm up but that too fizzled under cloud cover and more rain. I cannot remember too many winters with so many cold and rainy days, in January we had 21 days of rain and a lot of cloud cover, only 3 days of sunshine the entire month. Water temperatures are in the 40's and fishing is a bit slow.

One thing about being in this business, you learn soon enough that no matter how bad things might seem they'll always get better and I'm sure we'll be crying, "it's too hot and sure need some rain," before too long. So let's go ahead and pretend that we've got a warming trend coming and we're looking for things to pick up. I always tell people that a cold winter and a gradual warm up are very favorable for West and East Bay. These bays have lots of muddy coves and these are always the first to warm up and turn on. Trinity Bay is such a big, deep bay that it takes longer to warm up for our spring run.

During the latter part of February and early March I will be concentrating on fishing the south shoreline of West Bay. The coves down the south shoreline are usually our best bets for catching big trout this time of year. Trophy-sized specks are our big bonus this time of year and everyone is wade fishing with high hopes. I always start by scouting the coves that are holding the most bait. Outside of these coves you have guts running up the shoreline that schools of trout follow in their movements from deep water to the back of the coves as weather and abundance of bait will provide.

There is bound to be some topwater action, especially during late afternoon hours of warmer days, but mostly the big trout tend to prefer our Corkies and 51-series Mirrolures. It's always a good idea to carry a 7M Mirrolure for quiet surface work in the back of the coves when the wind lays down, but primarily it'll be those two types of sinkers I mentioned that'll pull most of the bites. For the days when the trout do not pull up on the flats, we usually just wade down the edges of the guts and throw tails out deep in order to find them.

East Bay is the same thing. The far north end holds the warmer water; it has a softer muddier bottom with scattered shell in it. We have been doing quite well on the warming trends before these fronts. Good sunny days help get the shallows warmed up and naturally the bait pulls up and the fish come in right behind it. We are using the same lures over here as well, Cory's Mirrolures and some soft plastics. That is pretty much the way we have been fishing.

Trinity Bay has been sitting on the back burner for a while now. The water color is off due to the runoff we have had from all the rain, plus the cold temperatures aren't helping. It will come back around unless the rivers get back up and flood us again. But we are not looking for that to happen.

Now upstream in some of the back bays like Burnett Bay ,Scott Bay, San Jacinto Bay and Tabbs Bay, they are catching a few fish out there while drift fishing. I have not been fishing it much because I am out for the big bite right now. On the smaller back bays they are catching solid fish in the 2-3 pound class using soft plastics and Mirrolures.

That is pretty much it. We have not been able to get out much due to the weather, and when you do go it can be pretty miserable some days. Nobody wants to stay out on the water for more that 6-8 hours because of the cold; it just gets you down.

We are looking forward to a good spring, usually when you have a cold winter it makes for some good shallow water spring fishing. Hopefully that will be the pattern again because we still have ample fish out there. We dodged a lot of bullets with the cold weather and no freezes, no fish killed. I think we are going to have a good spring along the upper Texas coast. Good Luck and Good Fishing!