Fishing team’s trip to Port Aransas was a game-changing event. All this time we had sweated and labored to catch a few under-sized largemouth and sunfish hardly larger than our hand. But in the autumn waters of the Gulf of Mexico the fish are plentiful and willing. In fact the problem wasn’t catching the fish, the problem was trying to get the more valuable sport fish to take the line before the swarms of panfish, needlefish and baitstealers.
Not that I minded catching a lot of little fish. I’m as entertained by a new species on the end of my line as I am by a fish with great size and fighting temperament.
Step one on getting into town was stocking up on bait and rigging. According to my research, popping bobbers are the standard setup. Apparently the fish are so forgiving of presentation that you can have your bait ten inches beneath a bright orange bobber on a thick wire, then if you splash the bobber around, the fish will think it’s the greatest thing in the world. So I got one of those from the Port A grocery store, along with a couple of cups of bait. Every grocery and convenience store on the coast has a little freezer filled with frozen cups of squid and shrimp where other stores would have Ben and Jerry’s.
When I put my selection on the clerk’s conveyor belt, Third Degree looked at my frozen squid, bobber, and pixie stick and said “Right there is a recipe for a wild night on the town.
The first night we were at the beach house on Port Aransas I did no fishing. The girlfriend was with, and I thought it would be politically prudent to be social. At least at first.
But I was up with the dawn and down at the beach, wading up to my armpits in the surf. I had my ten-dollar Academy catfish pole with the twenty pound line rigged up with a three-hook fish finder system. A variety of kahle and circle hooks rigged up with frozen shrimp.
Almost immediately that the line was in the water I caught two fish.
They were sleek and large, golden fish with a down-turned mouth. I was shocked. I immediately mis-identified them as immature red drum, but under-sized for keeping, so I threw them back. Sometime later, when I was back at home and connected with reliable internet (the beach house claimed to have wifi, but did not actually have anything workable) I discovered that they were probably gulf kingfish, or a similar species. Third Degree and I caught dozens and dozens of these fish, enough to feed a small army, but we threw them all back, thinking it was illegal to keep them.
In general, we fought a steep learning curve. It took me a full day to figure out the depths of the water in front of the beach. There were two trenches, or “guts” running parallel with the beach. Most of the waves broke against the sandbar at the end of the first gut. I had been casting into the waves thinking that’s where the deep water was, when in actuality that’s where it was most shallow, only about thigh-high.
After a while I waded onto the sandbar so I could cast into the second gut. The un-tamed waves crashed into me with enough force that it sometimes set my head ringing. The first gut held hundreds of kingfish, while the second gut had a few more interesting species. There were plenty of catfish farther out, which was a surprise. They looked almost exactly like channel catfish, except perhaps a little stouter of body. Supposedly they can be eaten, although they are not particularly respected considering the other fish that are available in the Gulf.
A couple times I caught fish on every hook on the line.
Needlefish and mullet also took the line on occasion, and at one point I saw a stingray sliding through the silty foam near the shallows. Shrimp seemed to get the most bites, but squid stayed on the line better. The Gulp!-brand shrimp managed to get a few fish on the line, but not with the regularity of other bait.
I managed to get the cast net working, and caught a few of the mullet that swam in a continuous undulating line twenty feet from shore.
Most of the fish we caught were pretty small, but there was one point where something took my line, something so heavy that the pole bent over double for a minute and then the line broke.
All in all, it was a good day of fishing, even though Third Degree and I didn’t wander much farther than a couple blocks from the beach house.
After dinner, not wanting to waste any precious fishing time, we headed out to the fishing pier. By the time we got there, the gates were open and whoever would have normally collected the fees had gone. It was almost 10PM, but the place was packed. Curiously though, we hardly saw anyone reel in fish. All day we had been catching fish on every cast, but out at the fishing pier it was dead. Folks leaned against railings stained dark by seagull poop and fish guts. By and large they used cheap fishing gear (including, I noticed, the exact same Academy catfish rod that I had destroyed in the surf that day). They all had the look of chronic gamblers slumped against slot machines.
We saw a guy next to us catch a fish that could have been a pompano. He said he was from Waco and this was his first time fishing on the coast.
Third Degree caught a few panfish, grunts or possibly croaker (a testament to how green we were as coastal fishermen that I’m not entirely certain there’s a difference between the two), by dragging some squid across the bottom and gently setting the hook when he felt the strike from his lofty vantage point above the waves. I didn’t catch a dang thing.
Crossed lines were common on the pier.
We left when a guy showed up pulling a trailer of gear behind his bike. Third Degree tried to talk to him, but the guy barely even grunted to acknowledge our presence.
On my last day on the coast, I stole away for a while to fish the jetty. When looking at the area on satellite view I got the impression that the jetty was pretty long, but you don’t really understand that it’s a pile of cyclopean granite blocks stretching for miles in a perfectly straight line.
There were as many people on the jetty as had been on the pier the night before, but the jetty was so much longer that you could set up almost anywhere and have a hundred feet of room. Sea turtles the size of hubcaps would breach every few minutes, sticking their cute turtle noses above the water before diving back to the depths.
I walked out what I thought was a long distance down the jetty but was probably only about a third of the way, and set down my gear. I tried using the fish-finder rig again, casting out as far as I could. I had the impression that the sea was very deep there, because the line would just sink and sink. Every time I pulled the line in, it would either become snagged on the rocks of the jetty, or all of the bait would disappear down the gullets of the panfish hiding in the rip-rap. The little fish darted out of their hiding places in the cracks of the rocks so fast that they were blurs.
After I lost two whole containers of frozen shrimp I changed tactics. I broke my last two shrimp into pieces and put them on much smaller hooks under a bobber. Immediately I caught two little croakers (or possibly grunts). They were no larger than a Waller Creek sunfish, but they fought twice as hard.
So I put the darn little bait stealers into a bucket, and then rigged one of them under the popping cork I had bought at the Port A grocery store with a circle hook.
I had cast only a few times when something hit the hook so hard that it immediately bent the clasp straight and disappeared with hook and croaker both. And by then it was too dark and I had to return to the beach house.
So that’s what I’ve been thinking about all winter. While the Fishing Team has been suffering through the freshwater winter doldrums, while all the bass and sunfish disappear to goodness knows where, my dreaming thoughts return again and again to that last fish. That giant that I should have caught. When the time is right I shall return for it and I will hold its mammoth body in my hands and find out who it was who had bested me that evening on the Port Aransas jetty so many months ago.
