Hot Weather Fishing

Transcribed with permission from the Port Isabel/South Padre Island (Texas) Press Parade -- September 1997

Lou reveals Fishing Secrets

Sure has been hot this summer. Days in the 90s and nights just barely cooling off to the high 70s. The water in the Lower Laguna Madre has stayed at a constant temperature of 83 degrees since the first of June.

This has really made fishing difficult. You either fish at night or real early in the morning if you expect to catch any fish at all. But there has been a rainbow in the gloom. There has been a real consistent fishery in the deeper water.

All summer, if you concentrated on the deep water structures, you stood a real good chance of taking some real impressive stringers of speckled trout with a few good flounder thrown in as a bonus.

Now it hasn't been easy, but with a little bit of thought on how the fish are holding, I have come up with a few shortcuts to fishing the deeper structures of the bay.

Fish like structures because they hold bait. This is why the Port Isabel fishing pier has been so good this year. They have been dumping oyster shells all along the pier for over two years. This has formed a reef-like structure that holds small crabs and shrimp that in turn draw small fish, that attract larger fish, etcetera.

So, actually, any of the areas near town, like the old causeway, the new causeway, or the jetties, are deep-water structure holding areas.

Now these are real good areas to fish. You have structures which hold bait and deep water which is cooler by as much as 10 degrees so it forms an air-(water) conditioned restaurant for fish.

Now we all pretty much know how to fish these areas and they are easy to find since part of the structure is above the water.

But the deep-water structures I have been fishing all summer in the Intracoastal Waterway. Very few days this summer have passed without my charters taking their limit of real fat and sassy speckled trout in a half-day of fishing.

What I have found are some shortcuts that tell me where and why the fish are holding in one area and not another that looks identical. Even though the Intracoastal is a dredged channel, the depth is not uniform as a depth finder will point out.

I have found that there are a lot of "holes" in the Intracoastal that will have depth of 20 feet or more. I have located quite a few of these spots (the deeper the better) and will go from hole to hole until I find fish holding in one of them. Usually when I find the fish, there will be a lot of bait shrimp clumped in schools right off the bottom. It takes some practice, but a ball of shrimp makes a real definite mark on your depth finder.

I anchor usually in 12 to 13 feet of water, which is usually just far enough off of the edge of the channel to cast a "free" shrimping rig consisting of a number 5 black swivel attached to about 12-14 inches of 30- pound green Ande leader with a number 4 Mustad treble hook.

We bait this with the largest live shrimp we can find and cast to the grass line at the edge of the channel. You let the tide carry the shrimp down the channel, letting the perch attack the shrimp. This activity brings the trout up out of the deep hole you are anchored over and they take the shrimp away from the perch.

Once you get the trout moving you can usually take anywhere from three or four trout to as many as 30 on a good feed.

The one mistake that I see other fishermen make when fishing this way is that they don't visualize the structure they are fishing. In your mind, you have to try to remove the water from the structure so you can see how the fish are holding and reacting to the bait.

The big secret on the Intracoastal is that the fish hold away from the edge near the bottom and come up the wall (real sheer drop into 10-11 feet and then into the deep hole) to attack and feed.

First, getting the perch to feed draws the trout up, but the natural movement of a shrimp being eaten is to try and escape into deeper, darker water. The trout, of course, know this and will move to the base of the wall to watch for shrimp trying to flee.

Now as the action heats up, the trout seem to feed farther and farther off the wall (sometimes as far as five to six feet) so you shorten your cast. But when the shrimp hits the water, feed out about eight to 12 feet of extra line so the pattern is constant along the edge, but farther from the wall.

I also have found that chumming an area will do nothing but bring in smaller fish and actually stop the bigger fish from feeding, mainly because they aren't fast enough to compete with the smaller fish and are just plain lazy. I have also found that as the tide gets stronger, the fish feed farther and farther away from the edge; sometimes as much as 20 or more feet out from the edge.

Another thing I have learned is that even though the impulse is to weight the shrimp down, say with a split shot, when you think the fish are deep, you are actually hindering the natural movement of the shrimp and the fish don't feed as well.

This is a little bit of what I have learned this year and hope it will help you be more successful in your fishing. But be aware! The one thing I have found is that next year, it might change.

Good fishing
Capt. Lou Austin

Return to the Fishing Articles page.

Return to the Port Isabel/South Padre Island fishing page.