Moonlight on the bays

I went down to Corpus Christi this weekend to fish my cousin George once again. Originally the plans were to do an offshore trip but that didn't pan out as there was no scheduled trip out on Friday.

The first thoughts were to fish some bridge lights from the kayak but we ended up fishing with the sail line at Bird Island Basin since the winds were a fairly steady 20 knots from the East to Northeast. We only ended up with a few undersized trout and one keeper trout. We also ended up with two black drum and so we gave up around 2am.

On Saturday afternoon with took the kayaks out to Deadman's Hole. No sooner than we paddled out to the north in search of redfish and got to the deeper water did we stumble onto a large school of keeper to oversize redfish containing dozens and dozens of fish. The water was bronze with redfish. The only problem is they didn't care for any lure or fly we threw at them which was frustrating. According to my cousin, they were hunting by smell not sight. They saw my spoonfly alright since I saw them swim right underneath it. We did catch a few small trout but no reds that afternoon. We decided to come back with the sail line and some live shrimp for a night wade and see if our luck would change.

That night we came back to Deadman's with waders on since the water was a bit cool. The tide was rising fast and we could actually see the water slowly creeping up on shore. We set the sail line out and then after a while took the baitbucket with shrimp out for some wadefishing by moonlight.

The first thing I caught was a small stingray. George caught a small hardhead and I think I had one to but it came off. These are the downsides of live bait; they attract trash fish. George did manage a rat red but the big schools of keeper redfish we had run into that afternoon. Around 11pm we called it a night. The laguna was beautiful in the moonlight. Even without the fish, it had been a good night to be out and about.

This was an interesting trip since I actually got to use four forms of fishing: 1) fly casting 2) baitcasting with shrimp 3) sail lining and 4) baitcasting with artificial lures and none was particularly productive. Oh well, we'll nail them next time.