This certainly was a fishing trip, and not a catching trip.
I spent the weekend in Galveston and Port Bolivar fishing the Texas coast for the first time with friend Kenney Lewis from Arkansas, hoping to reel in a few redfish or trout. Unfortunately, the fish didn’t feel like cooperating.
Maybe the only thing more stubborn than the fish was my buddy and I, as we decided to go through with the trip even in the face of 80 percent chance of thunderstorms. During the weekend we could see the storms in the distance, but we were never hit by any.
The first night we fished in Port Bolivar, where we found plenty of shrimp, blue crab and mullet to bait our lines. Despite staying at it until 2 a.m., we only managed two hardheads and two gafftops.
After a three-hour nap in the truck on the beach, we headed just east of High Island around sunup. There we talked to a few different groups of fishermen, none of whom had caught any reds, but a few had managed a couple of trout. We threw out multiple lines at different distances off the shore — some with a single small finger mullet, a couple with multiple finger mullet on one hook and a couple of lines with large mullet. We also waded out with artificials, including scented plastic shrimp, jigs and top-water crankbaits, to no avail.
However, two of the lines with mullet were successful, as we caught one trout and one small shark, along with a half-dozen more catfish.
A factor that could have hurt the fishing for us was the seaweed — we constantly had to pick it off our lines and weights.
Whatever the reason, it was a nice weekend with mild temperatures and minimum mosquitos, and a trip I would like to try again — thunderstorms, or not.
