This past Sunday I drove down to Garden Ridge, Texas and visited with my cousin and his wife, George and Ann Pyland. We got our days mixed up and I thought that I would show up on Sunday, but Monday was the day that George thought, never the less it all worked out and later that afternoon we drove on down to Rockport. I might add that on the way down we were a couple of hours ahead of a norther that would blow us out of our fishing trip on Monday.
Both of our dad’s said that there was no use to get an early start on winter fishing, so we slept in and didn’t hit the water until 9:00 AM. The weather was real nice Tuesday morning, light seas, light wind, but the tide was way out. With Ron and Dick, two of George’s fishing buddies to fill out the boat, our trip was to the “Canals” north of Port Aransas, we trailered down and launched at a nice bait camp, probably maintained by the State, and after a short boat ride we arrived at the our spot.
We fished this hard for 3 hours and only had one speckled trout 15 inches long to show for it, so we left this spot and after lunch headed to the upper reaches of St. Charles Bay. Our first cast was met with a strike and George hauled in s speck just under the 15, inch limit, but within 2 hours we had caught 5 more specks all over the size limit, not to say of the several we caught just under the limit..
On one cast I had a big strike, a good fish, but as I was fighting it, he came toward the boat and literally spit out the bait. I knew he wasn’t hooked good because after the cast I began popping the bait and by the time I had finished my rod was almost vertical with very little room left to set the hook, then the fish hit. The speck was almost 24 inches long, which would have been the fish of the day.
The fishing dropped off and we moved to another spot, the honey hole, from the way they all talked about it. Dick said that he would try some dead bait and see if he couldn’t entice a redfish, which we hadn’t seen one all day. He cast out, the wind was really blowing, and he missed the mark, but as he popped the cork, it went under and he was fast to a fish, type unknown. Fighting the fish to the net, it was a black drum, the best eating fish on the coast, we caught several more using the shrimp, ending up with three. We threw four or more back, really we got to playing around and threw several keepers back, so what if we had a little fun!
Our dad’s said, “If you caught them every time out it would be called catching instead of fishing.” We drew a blank almost at our first spot, but the second one paid off with 5 specks and 3 black, drum. I had the drum last night, cooked with butter and Cajun seasoning along with a baked potato and cleaned my plate!