Summer Fishing is HOT!

And I don't mean the weather. We've been hitting our wade spots very early in the morning, like before light. If you want a spot, you gotta get there early. Tides have been strong and lots of bait . We've been throwing plastics, but topwaters are also catching fish. 
I have started using the 51/2 inch Yum Shad. Its a big bait and fairly expensive, but not as costly as croakers. Its a very soft bait and I am finding that it is most effective by simply rigging it with an eighth ounce wide gap head and simply cast and use a slow retrieve. I am putting no rod action on the lure. The bigger trout are slamming it. Many times they are simply rolling it up in their mouths and letting go as I get ready to net. No hook set!!
Today we were on our bar and by 7:30 we had a three man limit of 20-22" fat boys! We also had nine other boats move in by eight. 
We continued to catch and release trout until around 9:30 and then headed back to PI. I switched to topwaters and for about 30 minutes had probably another twenty trout on. Its been great!
Here are some pics from the last three days. Gotta head to Houston in the am. Take care...Be careful...and God Bless!

TIME PASSES TOO QUICKLY......especially when you get OLD!

It's hard to believe that the last time I wrote in this blog was eight months ago. I've celebrated another birthday, anniversary, hunting season, Christmas, new year, spring break, and a great start to the 2016 fishing season.
We've had the usual early spring weather with cold front after cold front. Lots of wind with those fronts, and then those fantastic days following. Its during these times when our waters turn clear and the winds drop to almost nothing that the fishing becomes HOT!
It's wader time in January, February, and into March, but April is the time to put those puppies away and get wet. There have been those days that drifting paid off, especially if you had some of those "fishermen" who repeat that age old saying, "Why get out of a perfectly good boat and get wet?"
My answer is "we are drifting right over some great fish and they want slow fished baits this time of the year." Doesn't work, they still insist staying in the boat. Can't really blame a couple of them, as they are short people and some of the places I like to wade are "deep".

For many years I , like my brother in law, David Wood, have been a die hard topwater plug fisherman, but old age has forced me to change my ways. Working that topwater hours on end tends to play heck with my arthritis. There was a period where I really shunned Gulp, but last year started fishing it. Its easy to use and catches lots of fish. Still a little specialized in the kind of Gulp I use...only use the Gulp Croaker!
I still like to throw plastics. We just had my sister in law come down for a visit and she managed to bring her husband, Don Rink. Don is a great guy, loves to fish, but is a home body. Leaving his place in Beaumont for more than a day causes him undue worries. I love him as he always comes bearing gifts. He and wife are great garage salers and this time he brought me a tackle box filled with plastics. There were more than a hundred bags of "good" brand name saltwater plastics along with several hundred jig heads....I think he paid $8 for the total!
Also I've been taking lots of GoPro videos and have to decide when and how I'm going to use them.
So I plan on writing some more and trying to put together a few videos.
See you on the LLM!

"Early Morning Start"

Been real lax on writing in my blog. Seems its easier to just go fishing. I've been taking lots of video and finally decided I needed to put some together. This is GoPro footage using a chest camera. I've decided to try other techniques since Michael has really gotten into doing an almost daily video update on facebook and WWW.texasbowhunter.com.

Hope you enjoy.