Springtime Redfish and Trout Hunters: There Will Be Mud
This won’t come as an epiphany to old salts, but we’re at the time of year when mud matters. Mud bottoms are dark, and as such, they draw heat much more rapidly than light-colored sand and shell. (Think tar paper or asphalt on a sunny day.)
Throughout the winter, the shallows’ quick-to-warm quality plays an essential role during sunshine-laden days that fall in-between cold fronts. Now that it is warming up, and substantially (we did, after all, break a heat record yesterday), black bottoms are all the more valuable to fishermen seeking the forage species that are always key to locating predator fish like redfish and trout.
Aside from its color, the gooey consistency of a mud bottom is no less invaluable to dinner-seeking sport fish. Crabs, and come this time of year, shrimp, have a much easier time burrowing down into the cover of the bottom when it is soft. Given soft consistencies, the crustaceans can virtually disappear below the bottom silt.
Bottoms of this sort are the stuff of classic “tailing redfish” set-ups. Reds have those hard, blunt noses for a reason: Their sturdy snouts enable them to root about soft bottoms and unearth a host of forage with minimal effort. The red’s acute sense of smell serves it well, too.
Unknown to some, speckled trout can and commonly will do the same. That’s one reason that the upper end of East Galveston Bay, near the Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, is such a consistent big-trout producer at this time of year. Ditto for Aransas Bay (one spot in particular is called “Mud Island” for a good reason), the fringes of Mesquite Bay out of Rockport, and countless other cushy-soft saltwater terrains throughout the coastline. Big trout are bulking up in preparation of the season’s major spawn, and weight-wise, they will be as hefty as they get inside the next month or so.
Mud bottoms are the devil to wade fish. I spent many a miserable day slogging through knee-deep goo along the south shores of East Galveston and Trinity Bays before the advent of kayaks. Now, thanks to the versatile and nigh-indestructible plastic boats, I’m able to quietly paddle deep into locales that hold super-deep mud and yet barely break a sweat in the process. I do, however, break a line or two on occasion.
This year, along with the typical topwater-walking, jighead-bumping approach that artificials command, I am also going to do some testing with offshore-size Black Salty baitfish (the medium size, from 4-1/2- to 5-1/2 inches long; for details, go to www.blacksalty.com ). We’ve long known that the appearance of a single finger mullet can betray the presence of feeding trout. Catch is, especially at this time of year, live (and perhaps most importantly, ready-when-you-need-it) bait can be tough to procure. I keep the pond-raised Saltys in an aerated, freshwater tank in my back yard, and on occasion, will pick them up at Tucker and Sons Bait off of Galveston’s 61st Street.
Either way, the strategy entails free-lining. If you check CCA STAR Tournament data of years past you will find that a large percentage of the 8-pound-plus specks that make the leader board on the Upper Texas Coast come Memorial Day Weekend are taken on live baitfish free-lined near jetty rocks. At this time of year, many of those heavyweight fish are roaming the flats of shallow-water bays from Sabine Pass to Brownsville, especially in areas where deeper-water channels are nearby.
I’m taking my bigger kayak, a 14-foot, 4-inch Malibu X-Factor, to target some of those otherwise-inaccessible shallow-to-deeper ledges, hooking a Salty with a wide-gap single hook (between the backbone and anal vent, so that the bait will swim naturally), and putting this particular strategy to test within the next few weeks.
You can, of course, do the same basic thing with a live finger mullet, piggy perch or other such baitfish. Again, however, at this time of year those baits can be difficult to find. Fortunately, during a prolonged warm-weather/warm shallow-water stretch like the one we are now entering, that should not be the case for the big speckled trout that we so avidly pursue.
Good fishing …
Boz
Howdy. I am 
