Today was filled with many moving targets and most of them were willing participants in this little game called fly fishing. Best fish measured 28.5 inches and kept David on his toes running in and out of the grass and mangroves that peppered thw salt flats of Mustang Island.
Hooked up again with a spare redfish on the sideloop
The tides are good and has steadily kept the fish moving up shallow and they are eating heartily. David learned the various techniques to entice those skinny water redfish quickly and displayed good form in waiting for those reds to set themselves up for the best shots. We fished only one area all day, never having to fire up the outboard engine until time to head home.
Nonstop action
All in all it was a fine day on the saltwater flats of the Texas Coast and much to be remembered.
Some dates in June are still available if you want to get on board and take your own shots at some of these fun filled redfish. Give me a call ASAP to get your preferred dates booked!
Some redfish have been visiting the shallows and these fish are up skinny on the feed. No nonsense, with a good cast these fish are pouncing the fly like a cat on a mouse.
Pothole redfish
When visibility is limited working the potholes strategically can also produce some decent fish.
I even tried taking a little video of the redfish feeding up shallow. Gotta watch the top of the frame to see it, and I don’t know if the quality is good enough.
Back at it tomorrow. I have some dates available this summer. Just give me a call and leave me a message. I’ll gladly return your call once I get off the water!
Hitting it hard tomorrow but Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday this week (June 7/8/9) are forecast to be excellent sight casting conditions!
Blue Bird Days are coming!
I am open these days so give me a call ASAP to book one or all three of these awesome days of fishing we have coming! 361-500-2552
The tides are beautiful and the fish are hungry! Right about this time last year the winds quit entirely and the skies turned blue for almost an entire month!
The Jacks are in the bay!!! Spin fishing clients Steve and Kim got more than they bargained for when Steve hooked into this monster jack crevalle. After a 20 minute rodeo running the engine to chase down this fish in 6 feet of water Steve had enough and we parted the leader. There are also some other early arriving species to my surprise and excitement but I wont disclose this little tidbit at this time… For now, give me a call and lets go bust up some gangs of jacks!
I am beginning to love the effects El Nino is having on our fishing! The abundance of fresh water from the heavens last year has made for a super abundance of food for the fishes! The fishing has been way above average lately not counting against what madness went down in February.
Considering the quality and quantity of fish that I am finding… take your pick! Do you want shots at good numbers of fish or a few good shots at quality fish of several species? And even despite inclement weather, some fabulous fishing is occurring for dedicated anglers.
Gator trout pre-release
Fortunately, the new Beavertail Skiff is the driest ride I have ever had on a flats skiff and even in rough conditions this boat performs very well.
By any measure this new boat goes everywhere the old boat could get. That’s the most thrilling part! Or, well, maybe seeing more than a dozen trophy trout in one day is a little more thrilling but nailing a 28-inch below average trout really got the blood pumping. Our imaginations have soared for the week following and still continues to grow and call us back to the water.
I have been running into a real mecca of giant trout and even on the days we couldn’t sight cast we got them dialed in on topwater flies. Some glorious fish have been revealing themselves putting on the feed-bag, and even sometimes when the angler least expects it. Lessons are learned by all in situations like that… “Never take your eye off the fly!”
chartreuse and black fly
The redfish are also hungry and some 20+ fish schools of oversized redfish are begging to be caught. Chartreuse shrimp and mullet flies are my go to color and choice flies of all time regardless of light conditions. Then I go to blue crab flies (bigger is better if you ask me) and don’t forget to have some plain white topwater flies ready to zing! The majority of the black drum have been a little scarce from my normal operating areas the last week but those that I did find were close to 10lbs and have even found at least 1 drum per trip between 25-40lbs. Ya Ya!
Here also is a little video of my good buddy Bob playing tug-o-war with a very respectable trout on a fine day last week while breaking-in the new skiff. Give me a call directly to book your next Texas Fly Fishing Adventure! Capt Kenjo 361-500-2552
Schools of black drum and redfish all day in one spot. Only reason to change spots is to give the school you’ve been whacking a break.
Single and doubled up reds cruising the open sand flats midday on a slack tide crushing crabs.
Slurped a top water crab fly
Redfish working an isolated turtle grass bed nailing grass shrimp, crabs, AND silversides.
Gangs of redfish in the mud creeks racing the grassy banks busting shrimp. Their crushers doing major damage to the blue crabs.
78 degree, calf deep water.Tails up for hours and well past sunset.
Mugshot
Sight casting to tailing fish no more than 30 feet away every 3 mintues. Nailing a fish 8 ft from your tippy toes after 6pm. That’s not easy with a 9ft rod. It’s always good idea to work on your short game!
These are just a few highlights of how great the fishing has been lately.
Some exciting new stuff is cooking for 2016! Book your next Texas Coast Fly Fishing trip today!
The 2016 Fly Fishing Season is officially underway and the last month has been fantastic and should continue if our weather patterns hold. Give me a call ASAP to book your next saltwater guided fly fishing trip. Don’t let February pass us by without going fishing! We will dodge the cold fronts and the fishing can be exceptional this time of year! Schooling fish and tailing fish can be found and these fish are hungry and willing to eat!
Good fun on the fly!
Back in January I spent a week, or maybe it was two, chasing some trophy trout that were quite the size of my leg! I don’t particularly focus on these fish but this year I found so many giant trout in one general area that I continued to target them for a bit. It was a tough bite and was only able to get a handful of shots over the course of the week and finally I didn’t catch one of those tree trunks.
Monster Black Drum
Those chances are not entirely past either though as the possibility of finding more trout in the trophy class should last into March!
peanuts catch big fish!
In the meantime we continued to clean up on redfish in less than a foot of water and the sight casting opportunities just kept coming. Then the schools of redfish and black drum came.
They are schooling up thick and while they were picky I did manage to find out what they can not resist!
Got out today with new client Tom after tropical storm Bill’s wrath had passed. The joke is that we got more wind/rain back in the month of May.
Return customer John had another good time before the storm with me chasing a few tailing/schooled up redfish on a super skinny tide.
Sight casted in 6″ of water!
Today’s long story written quickly is that Tom got his first redfish and flounder on the fly today and congrats to him for putting in such great effort! Never giving up always brings the reward and the highlight was when Tom ALMOST caught a 20-lb jack crevalle on a white crease fly!
Tom first Redfish on the fly
We were running between spots and a surface disturbance caught my eye off in the distance. I decided to swing wide and go in for a closer look and found out that a wolf-pack of jacks were finning the surface, their entire dorsal fins were sticking straight up above the water and about 20 of them were just cruising on the surface. Tom got the fly in front of one and it crushed the fly and had him so surprised we didn’t get a good hookset. Then Tom did it again and got the fly out front and this time we were sure to get a good hookset! The fish took off for the horizon and took close to 100yds of backing with him and the entire school too. But while the spool was spinning feverishly in reverse I heard a clanking on the deck. I look down and see something shiny and when I pick it up I realive it was spool knob! Dang! we yelle! This fight just got alot tougher with no way to reel in all that line with a big jack on the other end! So we used the boat motor to chase down the fish with Tom manually stripping in all the backing the fish made a hard run before we could get close and ended up popping the 15-lb tippet. All in all it was another gorgeous day on the flats with a big jack on the Hatch surprise!
Something is missing in this photo
Winds and weather are steadily improving and the fish are beginning their staging patterns again to get back up skinny. Give me a call to book, I have a few week days open.
Got a little time on the rocks this afternoon and managed to land 2 tarpon back to back. It was quite the luck of the draw and it felt great to get my hands on these silver kings even if they were only 3-ft in size. A lot of variables have to come together and the forthcoming days over the course of this next week should really produce some fun action on the fly! Paying attention to each individual variable in the environment leads to educated decisions. One must ask themselves questions like what type of bait is present, which bait is most prolific at the moment and other things like where is the strike zone and how long can I keep my fly in it before I loose it to the rocks, or a better question is can I even get my fly into what “i think” is the strike zone?
While your standard daytime fly colors are great, such as red/white, chartreuse, yellow, pink, and white… today seemed to be a little different in the way the sunlight was playing with color of objects in the water. So after throwing a chartreuse fly and a white fly (breaking off a 30lb jack in the crushing surf off the tip of the jetty) I decided to change it up and go with black since the raging tide has the water color off a bit although there were good clean pockets of water to be found.
So I moved back in a bit, took a better reading on the tides and setup in a good spot for that particular tides to make some short casts with long sink rates. Counting down my fly into the strike zone slowly I begin my retrieve, varying my technique I feel a rock hit my line and it moved! Sure enough I am hooked up and landing my first tarpon of the 2015 season, in the month of MAY!!! YEAH!
Black is a daytime color too
And then, after collecting a few scale samples, I step back in the hole, and cast again, and tap tap, I set the hook into the upper lip of a second tarpon. Unsure of the hooked species initially, I notice that it doesn’t jump but heads deep for the rocks and I feel the line against a rock. The fish shakes his head left and right saying, “No No No!” and then I would shake the rod back saying, “Come on, YESSSS! Get off that rock!” Keeping steady pressure and teasing the fish by shaking the rod and a minute or two later tarpon #2 decided to change its direction of travel and freed my line from the rock that had snared our connection. I quickly release the fish without removing it from the water and as soon as I set it loose the brilliant fish dipped its head and pointed its gaping lower jaw downward and slipped off into the murkiness that obscures our two worlds.
And then it all seems to stop… and I’ll just call this one a quickie! Confidence in fishing comes from constantly changing technique and method until a pattern can be established. Sometimes that involves a few fly changes, other times more tweaking of the variables is necessary. And sometimes after hours of changing everything we are doing, we are surprised when a fish hits our hook and in all the excitement instantly forget exactly what we were doing to entice that fish! And that is the thrill, the numerous challenges of our mental and physical capacity, stretching our limitations beyond the common knowledge.
So next time you get out there, dont just cast and retrieve… Make every cast and every retrieve different until you find the cadence where the fish are dancing and then jump right on in!
Bright and sunny this fish was right where we thought she would be!
Hooked up to a redfish on fly and West Coast Mike hangin on!
Summer Availability: Last summer the winds died out July 1st and the bay went flat as glass and you could see tails to the horizon. And so it begins, we switch to super small patterns with short stealthy casts to target tailing redfish. Multiple fish days exist in July and August and the tailing redfish action is red hot just like the sunshine! Give me a call now to reserve your spot on the bow of the boat! Capt Ken 361-500-2552
Spring Report: This year has been incredible including last winter. Many fish on the flats and then up super shallow early. There were some very nice sized ones to boot. All the rains we have been getting this year (seems they really started way back in January) are producing some great fly fishing action. In between the cloudy and windy days are bursts of sunshine, usually with a T-head looming somewhere on the horizon. The fishing under overcast skies and stiff breezes is also decent and 2 recent clients, both named Mike, hooked fish that got the best of them. West Coast Mike stuck out 3 days of grueling winds and while we had trouble finding good numbers of fish the first day he just wouldn’t quit. On the first day we got well adjusted and felt a tight team had been formed between angler and guide. Calling the shots from the platform is no easy task, especially for the angler when truckloads of mullets to 3 lbs are rampaging the flats scarfing up the freshly grown green algae and grasses. Day two with W Coaster Mike was a bit more mellow and the twitches began to subside, partially from casting fatigue, and also from getting a good grade on Day 1. One shot is all we got on each school of reds that we found. If they spooked the school would split and then scatter. Then we found a huge tailer along a reef with its broad fat tail flopping size to side as the fish was cruising up onto the top of the reef with the extremely high tides.
Sweet Serenity in rough conditions!
Mike made the perfect cast and when the fish ate I felt the boat jump as West Coast Mike drove the permeable Tiemco hook deep into the fish’s tough maw. But that fish was smart, and got down in dirty and cut-off Mike on the oysters. A quick retie of the trusted chartreuse mullet fly and wouldn’t you know on the other side of the reef was another big fish with its tail up and getting busy! Mike hooked up to this fish too but with the powerful hookset the fish shook its massive head violently and parted the 15-lb tippet. Back to back, and all in two casts.
Bonus Species, mark that one off the bucket list!
“Sight casting” can be done in cloudy weather too! Its just a little harder!
Not long after Mike nails a respectable southern flounder out of a pothole then later took a shot at a bull-rushing redfish and intercepted the fish with a well placed 70′ cast at which point it nailed the fly and ran upwind!
This one we landed and the sense of accomplishment and pride was almost overwhelming us both!
And so on for several more days we find a few fish that eat, but any mistakes are taken advantage of by the fish. East Coast Mike will attest to that, his only goal was to catch 1 fish but that make for a tough order sometimes!
All in all it was a thrill fishing with both of these fellas and while the sunshine is unpredictable and is good for sight fishing, fly fishing under less than gorgeous conditions can also be fun and rewarding!
