Fishing south Texas 1-21-07

Rebbasser · #1 01-22-2007, 03:44 AM

Well, we finally had a nice day-sunny, no wind, and temperatures in the 60s after a week of ice, cold rain, and for South Texas cold temperatures. So, to stop the symptoms of fishing withdrawl which are things like re-re-reorganizing tackle, pouring over tackle catalogs and surfing the net to different fishing forums my main fishing buddy and I headed out. It was a beautiful day to be out on the water. The winter weather had dropped the water temperature 5-6 degrees to around 50 so we fished slooow to start and picked up the pace a bit as the water warmed. It really didn't matter-I could not buy a hit. I threw a bunch of different lures and nothing was biting in the usual locations we fished. My buddy caught 2 small largemouth bass, so we didn't get skunked by our primary target species, but it was slow going except for about 15 minutes in the middle of the day. There were a bunch of gulls diving into the water all excited about something, but we did not see any surface activity from fish. Still, we thought we would check it out. We had a hunch the activity was the result of freshwater striped bass chasing shad, and we were right. My buddy made a long cast with a bait called a Rat-L-Trap, a lipless crankbait:

And just started to retrieve it when his rod loaded up and he was rewarded with a striper that weighed about 2 1/2 to 3 pounds. I threw a tailspinner called a Little George

that I let sink to the bottom and then retrieved. One about the same size as my buddy's slammed my bait, and a second one hit on the next cast. Those stripers are fighters! I can only imagine what it would be like to tie into one that weighs 10+ lbs. Anyway, just getting out was great, and catching something was even better!