The Steady Roll of Springtime Black Drum
I’ve edited several major fishing magazines in the past three decades-plus, and of all the challenges I faced, one of the greatest was the perennial attempt to come up with an original headline wordplay about the annual spring drum run.
“Beat the Black Drum” (I’ll bet you a dollar that one has already made print, or is about to. It’s just too easy, and the pressure to produce quick copy is relentless.) “Drum Roll” is always a close second. Then there is the unavoidable reference to “Drumbeats” and the like.
I have serious sympathy for the editors of fishing magazines at this time of year, because if there is indeed an “original” black drum fishing headline waiting to see print, I’ll make a deep tip of the fishing cap to the individual who conjures it.
Nope, the headlines are predictable.
Fortunately, however, so is the spring drum run.
Throughout the Western Gulf Coast, big black drum are nudging amazingly close to shore in their annual effort to propagate. Perhaps the most outstanding example is only 20 miles or so from my home in Seabrook. The end of the Texas City Dike boasts super-consistent drum action year after year.
The Texas City Dike lighted fishing pier stabs toward the adjacent and deep waters of the Galveston Ship Channel. Anyone with a 10- or 11-foot surf-style casting or spinning rig, the ability to construct a reliable shock leader and a fresh supply of live blue crabs is liable to hook into a charcoal-sided, grunting bruiser of 20 pounds, or even twice that much. Veteran pier casters know the lay of the underwater land, and target a deep but relatively small hole located about two-thirds of the way down the planks and well offshore.
It takes a long, hard cast. When someone yells “Going out!” you duck, and do it fast. An 8-ounce lead, traveling at that speed, is nothing shy of a lethal projectile.
Black drum get big. Thanks to regulations that have long protected heavyweight spawning fish, the number of bona fide big drum has increased proportionately in the past decade or so.
There has been a payback for those who made the sacrifice. Today’s black drum limit rests at five fish per day, inside a legal slot limit of 14 inches (minimum) and 30 inches (maximum). After years of off-limits harvesting of bigger fish, anglers may now retain one black drum per day measuring 52 inches or longer; the fish counts as part of the five-fish daily bag limit.
Fifty-two inches?
That, my friend, is one huge black drum.
Actually, the 52-inch inclusion exists for a solitary reason, and that is the opportunity for an angler who is so lucky as to capture such a beast of a fish to enter it for inclusion as the new Texas state record (rod and reel) black drum.
The current Texas state record black drum tipped the scales to 81 pounds even and measured 51.18 inches long. It was caught June 19, 1988 by angler Wally Escobar, Jr. As for location, it is simply listed as “Gulf of Mexico.”
If you find such things interesting … and what angler doesn’t? … the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department’s “State Saltwater Records: Rod and Reel” listing was recently updated on February 19, 2008 and can be found online at http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/fishboat/fish/action/staterecords.php?env=SW&age_group=all&list=0&browse=Submit.
It’s been almost 20 years since Escobar registered that goliath fish. There is, no doubt, a black drum even larger roaming the deep-water channels off of the Texas coastline, but catching a fish of that size boils down, as much as anything, to outright, unfettered luck.
Most of us, Yours Truly included, will find plenty of fun in fighting smaller and far more typical black drum of merely 20 to 40 pounds.
Big drum are not spectacular fighters. They hug the bottom, making short, determined runs, until they finally surrender and come to the top belly-up.
When a big drum is taken from deep water and hastily retrieved via heavyweight tackle, it will often get the piscatorial equivalent of “the bends,” resulting in the sudden expansion of its air bladder. In such cases, be sure to puncture the air bladder of the fish before release (information on the process is available at the TPWD website, and entails the same basic procedure as you’d apply to big, deep-water redfish or, in offshore waters, red snapper.
Big black drum are notorious for carrying “spaghetti worms.” Said worms are harmless, but they are a long way from appetizing. Unbeknownst to many saltwater anglers, the same type of worms, albeit smaller, are also common in redfish, speckled trout, sand trout, Gulf trout and other species.
Like big redfish (“red drum” in biologists’ proper lingo), large black drum have coarse, dense meat that is heavily laced, along the lateral lines, with dark, fishy-tasting flesh. Collectively, these properties make the fish pretty poor table fare. Even very large fish yield surprisingly little quality meat … and that is using the description “quality” in generous proportion.
On the other hand, small “puppy drum” in the (roughly) 16- to 22-inch range are surprisingly good when promptly filleted, coated in fresh corn meal and fried.
My friend and longtime mentor, the late A.C. Becker, Jr. of Galveston, called the black drum “The Poor Man’s Big-Game Fish.”
Becker took great delight covering the annual black drum run for the Galveston Daily News. Most every year, he would venture to either the Texas City Dike lighted fishing pier or one of the several beachfront piers that jut from the Galveston Seawall to document an angler, usually a youngster, grinning ear-to-ear while hoisting a heavyweight drum from the planks.
Rich or poor, to every fisherman who witnessed it, the scene was priceless. For all-around big-fish excitement, my old buddy used to say, “You can’t beat the black drum.”
It was, he admitted, a cliché.
That, however, didn’t make it any less true.
If cabin fever is getting the best of you, from a pier or bay boat, give these fish a try. Just because the state record is 20 years old doesn’t mean it won’t be broken this year.
You won’t get it, though, unless your line is in the water.
The mere thought of it drums up plenty of excitement.
Howdy. I am 
