It's Spring Break at Rice University, so you know what that means...time to go fishing!
So we waited until the Houston rush hour traffic died down and headed down to the sleepy fishing town of Port O'Connor, TX for a few days with our little boat in tow. Port O'Connor ("POC") doesn't have any beaches to speak of, so there aren't the usual horde of tourists and beach-goers. No T-shirt shops, fast food joints and trinket dealers line the streets. What POC does have is miles and miles of bayous, shell reefs, islands, and backwater bays and lakes. The whole town caters to fishermen with marinas and bait stores everywhere you look. The atmosphere is relaxed and the people are all very friendly. We stayed at the Port Motel--not a luxurious place by any standard, but hey, we're here to fish, not to wallow in creature comforts!
Here's a map of the east end of Espirito Santo Bay (Microsoft TerraServer web site) Port O'Connor is at the upper right corner of the map.
The next morning, we packed our gear into the boat, grabbed a couple of breakfast burritos at Josie's mini-mart, got a pint of live shrimp and launched at the Fishing Center, which was all of one block from the motel.
(Click on a picture to see a larger version)
First, there was a bit of a surprise!
The first thing we saw were (bottle-nose?) dolphins swimming beside us as we motored down a narrow connecting bayou between Barroom Bay and Big Bayou (@ northern end of Bayucos Island) . What graceful creatures they are! At times, they were as close as 20 feet from the boat.
In another, larger bayou (Saluria Bayour--the south shore of Bayucos Island) we saw more dolphins swiming around. It's very hard to take their picture with a digital camera because of the shutter lag. We saw about a dozen dolphins in two days. They tended to be in the deeper bayous and channels which criss-cross the whole Espirito Santo Bay system where we were fishing. Stephen even saw a dolphin catch something and throw it in the air.
But this is a fishing trip...so let's see the fish!
We poked around a few bayous but didn't catch anything significant. We eventually we ended up on the south side of Grass Island, drifting in less than 2 feet of water. We were using the live shrimp suspended only 18 inches under a "popping cork", which is a bobber (float) that makes a clicking or popping noise when you tug on it.
Stephen drew first blood and landed a 24" redfish, the largest we had ever caught. But about an hour later, as we drifted around the southeast corner of Grass Island, Thuy tied into something big.
After a grueling, 10 minute battle that had Thuy complaining that her arms hurt, Stephen's short-lived record was shattered by Thuy's 27" redfish. Thuy was so tired she could barely hold her trophy up--poor baby!
On the way back to the dock, we stopped for "one last cast" at the mouth of a bayou entering Barroom Bay (the same one in which we saw the dolphins that morning). There was a small oyster shell reef and in spite of all the boat traffic from fishermen returning home, there was baitfish activity there. Stephen threw a Zara Spook topwater lure and tried "walking the dog". A fish attacked the lure but didn't get hooked, so Stephen kept trying. Then a 17 1/2 inch sheepshead grabbed the lure in its small mouth and we had our first sheepshead ever. Stephen at least had the sheepshead record...
The next morning, after seeing some more dophins, we drifted across the east end of Barroom Bay., Thuy promptly hauled in an 18" sheepshead. Another one of Stephen's records broken--sigh. She then added insult to injury by racking up the largest speckled trout of the trip (16"). What can I say? She always catches the biggest fish--no doubt due to Stephen's superior guiding skills! :-)
We then poked around some islands, getting stuck in the mud in the process. We gave up and drifted out of Barroom Bay to the northwest end of Bill Day's Reef in the northeast end of Espiritu Santo Bay. Here we found a hole about 6'-8' deep at the end of a shell reef. After watching another boat haul one huge fish after another out of this hole, when they finally left, we quickly anchored at the same spot as they. We discovered that they were sitting atop a sumerged reef and casting down the steep, shell-lined drop-off into the hole. We changed to a bottom-fishing rigs that held our shrimp up off the bottom so as not to get hung up on the oyster shells and found ourselves pulling in fish after fish. Stephen caught 3 nice black drum, the largest was 23" long--the only record of his to stand from the trip. Both of us caught numerous small speckled trout that we released.
After a hair-raising ride back to the dock along the length of Barroom Bay which was choppy and very foggy (we only ran aground twice), we spent the next hour cleaning our catch. Totals for the trip: 2 redfish, 2 sheepshead, 3 black drum (that's Thuy holding two of them), 4 speckled trout and one hardhead catfish. The Port Motel generously let us freeze them in their freezer. We then discovered that the two redfish, once stiff and frozen no longer fit into our ice chest and had to be brought home wrapped in our laundry. We shared most of the fish with friends and even had to borrow some freezer space from Thuy's uncle because we couldn't fit all of what we saved for ourselves in the tiny freezer in our home.
After dropping of fish at our friends and relatives and stowing the boat, we finally got home and collapsed into a deep sleep.
A very successful trip indeed. We'll be back to POC!