Bay food chain comes to life with tide change
Breakfast was being served Tuesday morning.
The low, broad sweep of coastal estuary rimming a lobe of Matagorda Bay shore was the larder and kitchen, with the bayou/ slough connecting the reach of rich wetlands to the bay serving as the dining room.
The morning’s tide was the waiter, bearing a silvery smorgasbord to a considerable and diverse bunch of hungry customers, most but certainly not all of them wearing fins and scales.
Along the shore of the open bay, just down current from the bayou/ slough’s mouth, a pair of bottlenose dolphins tore into their meals. Sheets of gray/green water exploded as the pair herded a school of fish and pinned their prey in the shallows, where escape routes were limited.
The dolphins’ gray backs and fins rose above the bay’s surface as they rocketed and writhed in the too-shallow-to-swim water — mammalian torpedoes detonating on silvery targets that looked to be speckled trout or maybe mullet. It was hard to tell in the dim, opaque light just ahead of dawn.
Todd Steele and I stood on the shore and watched the dolphins for a minute or so, noting how current created by the stiff-and-getting-stiffer southerly wind obviously had helped the bottlenoses corral their meals against the bay’s north shoreline.
Behind us, another scenario caused by current — this one driven by tide — was responsible for a similar chain of events, one into which we planned to plug.
“The tide’s just starting to change,” Steele said. “Things will start happening. Let’s fish.”
We stationed ourselves along a stretch of the bayou/slough, where the main channel turned and significantly narrowed as it connected to the bay.
Process is age-old
During the night, a strong incoming tide had pushed a wealth of green, salty water into the bayou, sending it down the channel and into the matrix of marsh, shallow lakes studded with towhead oyster reefs and up the network of natural drains and other waterways veining the estuary, inundating the oyster-grass and other vegetation between the low-tide and high-tide marks.
Now, the tide was turning, and with it an ageold series of events unfolded, as profound and amazing — and as productive for anglers — today as it has been for eons.
At first, the change was hard to notice. Just a slight shift in the way the water looked. A thin seam appeared near a stake in the water. A piece of soggy debris that sat suspended in the water began moving, almost imperceptibly at first, down the channel and into the bay.
In the estuary, water began retreating, the high tide now pulled in the opposite direction, ebbing away from the edges. As the water level began to fall, exposing previously inundated areas, the world of small marine creatures that depend upon the estuary as their nursery, refuge and larder are forced to move with it as their world shrank. Juvenile shrimp and crabs. Mullet and menhaden. Spot and croaker. Bay anchovies — “glass minnows” to most Texas coastal anglers. Killifish. All manner of juvenile finfish. They all moved with the building current, some carried against their will but many following instinct and the natural rhythm of tide’s rise and fall.
There are smaller things carried by the tide, too. Organic detritus, the microscopic building blocks of aquatic life and the barely bigger phytoplankton and zooplankton that depend on those suspended nutrients for sustenance.
Going with the flow
They all come together in the current, carried or moving on their own, until the flow concentrates them in the channels, pools and narrows.
As the tide fell and current increased, I noticed small flashes of silver beneath the surface near a narrow funnel in the channel. Thousands – tens of thousands, really – of fingernail-size menhaden hung in there, moving like a giant, glittering amoeba, all facing into the flow and feeding on phytoplankton carried to them on the conveyor belt that was the tidal current.
Then the menhaden cloud shattered, sending waves of silvery splinters across the surface as the water boiled.
I baited a treble hook with a live shrimp and cast from the shore to a spot in the channel where the current’s velocity had scoured a deep hole, let the eighth-ounce weight ahead of the 18-inch leader carry the bait to the bottom and kept a tight line as the current slowly carried the bait along bottom.
The strike came almost immediately, and when I set the hook the fish bore away in the classic style of a redfish.
The redfish had come for breakfast, stationing itself just down current from where the channel bent and flowed over a shallow flat. Like the tiny menhaden that had concentrated just downstream, the redfish understood the current would bring food to it.
The current created by the falling tide was carrying and concentrating life. The detritus brought the phytoplankton. The phytoplankton brought the menhaden. The current swept along crabs and shrimp and maybe a few marine worms and other benthic life unable to fight the flow.
Fish followed, driven by instinct and memory, to take advantage of the largess the tide’s current creates.
Find those places in bay systems, where current concentrates marine life and makes them vulnerable, and you will find fish. This is especially true in the confines of the estuaries that border the open bay. The network of rich wetlands and the waterways that knit the system together are particularly given to such events.
And for anglers, these life-in-the-food-chain situations are wonderful opportunities to enjoy great fishing. Taking advantage of these opportunities means understanding how and why fish will concentrate in certain spots during tidal movement. Current is the key.
“It’s a lot like fishing for freshwater trout,” Steele said of fishing estuarine waterways.
Anglers have to be able to read the currents, understand where fish are likely to concentrate — the holes and channels — and know to fish those spots. And, he added, there is the added challenge of learning tide tables, how to calculate strength of tidal movement, and the effects wind direction and velocity have on tides and water clarity.
But time it right, and the payoff can be great. It was Tuesday morning, and not just in fish.
Walking the bank and probing the channels and holes and narrows where current swept food to waiting fish, it was hard not to notice that other anglers were taking advantage of the tide’s bounty.
Terns and black skimmers dove and swooped overt the current, more times than not coming away with a glittering prize in their bills. Snowy egrets stalked the shallows, stabbing menhaden and killifish and the occasional shrimp swept along in the current.
Swarms of shorebirds, some residents but many of them migrants on their spring migration, worked the mud flats exposed by the falling tide, probing for marine worms or stranded fish and crustaceans.
I watched a pair of whimbrels as they hunted a tide-exposed mud flat pocked with the burrows of fiddler crabs. The big curlews were having a crab feast, their long, curved bills perfectly suited to extract the thumb-size fiddlers from their similarly curved holes.
But the birding was forgotten when a “thunk” shot up the line and I set the hook on something powerful and heavy that immediately began stripping line from the spinning reel. Fish on!
I was unhooking the 25-inch redfish when Steele walked up, grinning and holding a 4pound speckled trout.
Timing is the key
It was that kind of morning. Fishing wasn’t as fast as it can be when a tide change cranks up the action in these estuarine waterways; the strong southerly wind worked to blunt the velocity of the outgoing tide. But the fishing was steady, especially when we baited with live shrimp, the most productive natural bait a coastal angler can employ; every predatory fish in the bay loves shrimp
And such a universally attractive bait is the perfect one to use when fishing marsh waterways, where the diversity of predator fish is as rich as the rest of the life in these most productive of marine environments. We caught redfish, speckled trout, sheepshead and black drum. No flounder this time, but Steele had landed several while fishing the tide change the evening before.
And there might have been a hardhead or two landed as well.
We kept enough fish for a couple of good meals and released the rest.
Unlike the redfish and trout, some of which had stomachs so packed with menhaden, tiny croaker and other tide-borne tidbits that they looked like they would explode, we weren’t greedy. We know there soon will be many other days when the tide brings Texas’ estuarine waterways to life. The trick — and the blessing — is to be there when it happens.