Thank God for Texas Saltwater
Artist Jack Cowan captured it in his paintings as best as any man could.
But with all due respect to Cowan’s legendary talent, there’s still no
substitute for the real thing. Nothing even comes close—not to what I’m
looking at right now, anyhow.
Their blue-fringed tails shimmer brightly in the velvet-soft glow of a
blazing sun. The big orange ball is climbing fast, and the higher
it gets, the more the parking-lot-smooth surface of the Land Cut mouth near
Port Mansfield shines in the light.
They’re not big fish, just “rat reds.” But there are three of them, and
when I stalked up on them less than a minute ago it felt like I’d just come
nose-to-nose with a rocking-chair-racked whitetail buck standing in the
middle of a South Texas sendero.
The amber sheen of saltwater barely covers my ankles. It’s clear as
Evian, and those three fish don’t have the slightest clue that I’m here.
Thank you Lord, for this moment.
This snapshot in life, this breathtaking window of heightened senses, is every coastal fisherman’s high. Shock, gratitude, elation and anticipation
all condense into a single, knee-knocking, mesmerizing package.
Cowan didn’t name that classic flats scene “Memories” for nothing.
I want to freeze it, to hold this precious picture in place, savor it and
never let it go. But a moment like this is like a Popsicle in the summertime.
No matter how desperately you want it to last, if you allow it to linger too
long it’s going to disappear.
No more fooling around. It’s time to shoot.
One false cast, then the Temple Fork 8-weight fires the chartreuse/white Clouser Minnow about 5 feet ahead of and beyond the still-tailing and still-oblivious reds. The rod tip is pointed straight at ‘em. Two, then three hard strips of the floating line, and the water behind the fly rises with a sudden surge and slices apart in an accelerating vee.
With the typical tenacity of a striking red, the agitated fish pounces on
the Clouser like a pit bull biting a rat.
The water detonates in a thousand liquid shards, the bright-yellow Scientific Anglers weight-forward floating line stretches tight and, with a firm pull, the hook goes home.
On a popping rod it’d be just another undersized red. On the rainbowed longrod, peeling line against the steady resistance of a carefully palmed fly reel and blasting finger mullet aside in its angry wake, the fish is a prize.
Two minutes pass; then it submissively rolls over like a puppy that wants its belly scratched. I reach down, pop the hook free from its leathery mouth and watch with a deep sense of appreciation while one more better-educated redfish returns to the home environs of Texas saltwater.
Someday, with any luck, a kid watching his surf rod rest in a piece of
PVC pipe pushed deep into the beachfront sand will come flying out of his
lawn chair when this young fellow, all grown up, submarines down the second sand bar and opts to eat a fresh piece of cut mullet on a circle hook.
It’ll be a whole different affair … a different place, a different style
of fishing and a different angler of a different age. But the sensation, that
invaluable moment of bewilderment and awe, will remain the same. And one more fisherman will feel the feeling and experience the experience that those who have not will never understand or appreciate.
If they haven’t been there and done it, they simply can’t.
From Sabine Pass to South Padre Island, we of the Texas saltwater fishing fraternity are blessed with a bounty for which, to no small degree, we have ourselves to thank. We’ve paid the bills, we’ve tightened the limits and still we volunteer even more. Because in one fashion or another, the payback is priceless.
I watched with sheer delight a dozen Octobers ago while 5-year-old Elise Foote caught her first fish from the San Luis Pass Fishing Pier. Her father, my longtime friend, Dr. Larry Foote, is an oncologist in Houston. To call his job “stressful” is to say that Brett Favre took an occasional lump or two upside the head during his days with the Green Bay Packers. But when little Elise happily hoisted that palm-sized piggy perch over the pier railing, you could tell by the man’s face that he was thinking about nothing else.
She cranked down on the featherweight Shakespeare Synergy spincasting
combo like Marsha Bierman doing her mano-a-mano stand-up routine on a Costa Rica sailfish. And she was no less excited.
As for the good doctor, his wife Naomi and me, let’s just say it was good
medicine. Medical practice aside, Larry Foote is a very smart fellow—smart
enough to know that all it takes is $20 worth of tackle, a box of dead shrimp
and a few hours spent on a pier railing to make magic.
If saltwater fishing is anything, it’s magical. My son Jimmy caught his
first fish from that same pier back in 1985. Today, 23 years later, I still
remember his wide-eyed fascination with the “funny” sound of that loudly
protesting 5-inch croaker. And I recall how his next fish—a hardhead, of
course—further captured his all-too-brief attention span. Then it was a piggy perch and then a whiting, all caught, inspected and released.
“There are all kinds of fish out here!” he informed me in the garbled
dialect than only the parents of a talkative toddler can interpret. Still
less than 3 years old, he nonetheless confirmed the essence of what makes
saltwater fishing so totally intriguing to over a million or so people in Texas
alone. The coastline is an aquatic wonderland, an unbelievably diverse
environment that’s just as likely on the next cast to produce a lizardfish,
sea robin or ribbonfish as a speckled trout, redfish or flounder.
In the immortal words of Forrest Gump’s mama, Texas saltwater fishing
“is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.”
Five or 55, that’s an aspect of the sport that evades no one.
Age is not a factor.
I grew up fishing the Galveston Jetty System with my dad, the late Bill
Bozka, Sr. of Pearland, my older brother Bill and younger brother Bob. Once
in a while, we got to go with Jay Hall.
Jay—”Old Man Hall” as we used to respectfully refer to him—lived in
Alvin. He was already in his 70s when dad started taking us along with him.
He was a cranky, hard-headed old cuss with a heart as soft as silk, and even
though his God-awful stinking cheap cigars almost killed us—especially when
the ship channel waves were rolling bow-high to his ancient 15-1/2-foot RMC hull and we were seasick as pups—we adored him.
So did my dad. Because Old Man Hall loved to fish.
I don’t know that he ever threw an artificial lure in his life. He’d
thread two or three jumbo shrimp on a No. 6 treble hook, drop a
bank-sinker-weighted triple swivel rig to the bottom and—plying holes that he discovered sometime around World War II—catch the blazes out of redfish and trout.
He landed a 10-pound-plus speck on a live croaker in the mid-70s, decades
before most fishermen even suspected that croaker are primo big-trout baits.
He found the holes not with a depthfinder, but by viewing and triangulating
what he called “stripes” in the rocks—deep, drilled-out indentations that
remained like scars on the granite boulders’ faces after they were blasted
apart with dynamite high in the Texas Hill Country.
Jay taught a lot to my father, and the two of them in turn passed it on
to us. We learned not only how to fish; we learned to love the sport of
fishing for the sheer essence of what it is. Funky cigars or not, we couldn’t
sleep the night prior to a jetty-fishing expedition.
That insomnia had as much to do with who we were going with, and the fact
that they cared enough to take us along, as it did with catching anything. I
have never forgotten, and will never forget, those days. Three decades old,
those memories are as solid as the rocks we anchored on.
I seriously doubt, too, that little Elise, her older sister Monica
and her brother Aaron will forget catching fish off the pier with
their mom and dad in September of 2000. Nor will they forget the fact that
one of the busiest men in Texas took—make that made—the time to take them.
Seventeen years after his death I still wish my father could be with me,
looking on with an amused grin while a pound or so of very aggravated
ladyfish jumps a foot out of the water and then throws what is rapidly
becoming a worn-out fly. He’d hear the whistling wings of teal sailing
overhead and the laughing of gulls, taste the salt in the air and feel the
cool caress of a light north breeze tickling the flats. Still, he’s here in
spirit, just as he is every time I set foot in a boat and head out across a
Texas bay in search of the perfect sunrise—one that no artist but God can
ever create.
For that alone, I will forever be grateful that there is such a thing as
Texas saltwater.
Howdy. I am 
