Fly-fishing coastal shallows a real treat
Chuck Naiser killed the outboard motor propelling his poling skiff. The only sound now was a soft hiss that faded as friction of water against the hull slowed and then stopped the craft, leaving the three of us silenty floating in an almost seamless, seemingly bare and lifeless world.
But this place — a watery nook like scores of others amid the maze of bays, bights, reaches, flats, islands, reefs, back-bay lakes and sloughs of the estuarine matrix that is the Aransas Bay system of the middle Texas Coast — was so much the opposite. These shallows vibrate with life — extraordinary places offering anglers the opportunity to experience some of the finest, closequarters fishing on the Texas coast while immersed in a natural world of stunning diversity, complexity and just plain wonder.
That magical truth began revealing itself within moments of the boat settling.
Naiser uncoiled from the boat’s helm, moving with a quickness and athleticism that belies his 74 years but reflects the almost half-century that he has spent learning, fishing and guiding anglers on the waters around Rockport. He hopped onto a small platform rising a couple of feet above the boat’s back deck and, with a smoothness born of practice, shoved the end of the long pole in his hands into the bay bottom a few inches beneath the boat’s hull and squared the craft parallel to the nearby shoreline.
Tag-team effort
Just as practiced in his part, angler Troy Utz, fly rod in hand, moved to the bow of the 20-foot New Water Stilt poling skiff and took his station on a raised casting deck. There, he checked the knot on the Clouser Minnow tied to the tippet and then stripped a few yards of fly line, coiling the strips in the mesh baskets the casting platform held for this purpose.
Around them, the dead calm August dawn found the lobe’s shallow flats an expanse of smooth silver rimmed by a fringe of oyster grass, lks a band of the emergent, salt-loving vegetation extending a few feet into the bay. Here and there clumps of dark-green shrubs — black mangrove — squatted at the edge of the water, the plant’s pneumatophores — exposed “breather” roots —forming a tangled network of niches below and above the tide line.
Using the pole, Naiser eased the boat silently and slowly forward, with Utz perched and poised like one of the great egrets that stood stock-still here and there among the oyster grass and mangrove.
From somewhere in that mix of shoreline-rimming spartina and mangrove perhaps 15 yards from where Naiser’s boat floated came a high-pitched clattering followed by the sight of its origin — a dark, crouching, softball-size feathered figure on long legs, weaving effortlessly in and out of the stalks and roots. The clapper rail moved like a wraith along the shoreline shadows, hesitated and then shot its head forward, recoiled with the writhing dark form of a thumb-size fiddler crab clasp in itslong, curved beak, and then disappeared back into the labyrinth of vegetation.
The ancient game was afoot.
Ahead, down the shoreline and just a few feet bayward of a point of oyster grass, a swirl broke the water’s glassy surface. A few feet farther, a small mullet skittered toward the protection of the shoreline vegetation.
Another swirl formed near the first, a dark triangle the size of a child’s hand appearing in its center. The triangle moved, almost waving. Nearby, another appeared. And another, this one glittering electric blue in the low-angle morning light.
“Fish ahead,” Naiser quietly said more out of habit than necessity since Utz already was laser focused on the activity.
It was a pod of redfish, rooting for breakfast in the inches deep water. They were in a great place for it.
The shallows of this small bay and so many other areas along Texas middle and lower coast are carpeted with sea grasses. Shoal grass, mostly. But some turtle, grass manatee grass and, in this bay where a wet summer has kept salinity levels modest, wigeon grass.
That carpet of vegetation is a major engine driving the lifeof the bay. The sea grass serves as nursery and home for a world of marine life — forage fish such as mullet and bay anchovies, crabs, shrimp, marine worms, and juveniles of almost every fish that live in the bays.
Just as important — and crucial for anglers — those pastures of sea grass are larder for larger species such as redfish, speckled trout, drum, sheepshead and just about every other predatory estuarine fish.
The flats are their feeding grounds. And so they are, too, the hunting grounds of anglers willing to engage these fish on the terms demanded by these often just-inches-deep expanses.
Fishing as an art
Poling a shallow-draft skiff and targeting fish anglers can see — sightcasting to specific targets — is one of the highest arts of fishing. And doing this using a fly rod is the highest of such arts. It demands stealth, skill, knowledge and understanding of quarry, teamwork between guide and angler, with both having a deep focus and awareness of the world around them.
Utz and Naiser have such a connection, both with the bay and each other. Both have fished these waters since they were young and spent many days together on the water. This day, they had the places they chose to fish to themselves; no other boaters intruded on the shallow flats they plied on this weekday morning of a sweltering August.
“Two o’clock. Twenty yards,” Naiser said as he silently maneuvered the boat close to the swirls and waving tails. From his elevated perch, and with the help of polarized glasses, he could see the redfish in the clear water.
Utz, also wearing polarized glasses, could see the fish and worked out line with a series of false casts, and then hit home with a cast that dropped the tuft of fur and tinsel ahead of a hunting redfish.
“Strip,” Naiser said. Utz already was, taking in line in short, sharp tugs, making the fly move like a possible meal.
A redfish swirled and missed. Subsequent casts went untouched. The reds squirted away, uneasy.
Just part of the game. There would be other chances. Lots of them on this morning.
Naiser poled the skiff along the flat, moving silently and methodically. The pair were seldom out of sight of fish. Moving over the flats, the boat passed over sea grass, where crabs scuttled and an alligator gar rested silently like it was sleeping on a mattress of shoal grass. Bay anchovies and mullet and piggy perch darted into the vegetation as the shadow of the boat passed overhead. Looking over the side of the boat was like viewing a huge aquarium.
But life wasn’t limited to the water. Overhead, frigate birds soared, twisting their forked tails to turn and brake as they, too hunted. Along the shoreline, least sandpipers, oystercatchers and a handful of other shorebirds skittered over patches of shell, probing the sand, mud and shell for marine worms and other invertebrates.
Dragonflies hunted, too. Dozens of them swarmed over the shoreline and the marsh grass behind it, feasting on the abundance of midges and mosquitoes and other insects. Occasionally, one would land on the boat, its metalliccolor bodies glittering blue and green and red and orange in the August sun until it had rested enough and then rattled off to its business.
At peace with nature
We drifted past small islands holding rookeries of colonial water birds — egrets and herons, mostly, but roseate spoonbills and ibis, with their wobbling, spiky-feathered young squatting in impossibly unstable-looking nests, clamoring to be fed.
Fish would appear, sometimes giving away their location by swirls or showers of forage fish or small shrimp fleeing for their lives. Most were redfish but not all. There were black drum, sheepshead and even a few long, lean speckled trout that appeared and disappeared like specters against the dark background of shoal grass, only to show themselves as dark shadows of the patches of bare sand that dot the sea-grass meadows.
Once, while easing along a shoreline, a flounder appeared, chasing forage fish against the bank and almost flapping itself ashore in pursuit. It turned down the fly that Utz perfectly presented to it, multiple times.
Other fish were not so picky. Several times over the morning, Naiser would ease the boat within a dozen yards or less of a patch of waving tails, and Utz would lay a Clouser or a crab imitation fly before them, strip in a couple of times, and the water would surge as the red pounced, boiling away when the it felt the hook and throwing a deep arc into the 8-weight rod that a grinningUtz held high overhead.
Naiser was smiling, too. Guiding fly-fishers on these shallow flats, poling and looking and instructing — all the while surrounded by one of the most electric, robust, diverse and endlessly fascinating natural places — has been his passion and profession for decades. Poling the flats, guiding fly-fishers, is his specialty; it’s the sole way he fishes.
“It’s the only way I want to fish; the only way that makes sense to me,” he said, scanning the bay for signs of another school of fish. “We have this incredible resource — these flats. How can you not love this?”
The perspective from the front of the boat was equally effusive, even on this sweltering August day.
Troy Utz has fished all over the world, including some of the most famous fisheries for some of the most sought-after fish — places such as the Amazon for peacock bass. But the Houston businessman who first fished these waters 50 years ago with his grandfather doesn’t hesitate when asked his favorite.
“This place right here,” he answers, scanning the flats for the next set of waving tails marking feeding redfish, the rich scent of salt and marsh grass and fecund mud/sand in the air. “There is no place better or like it. No place I’d rather be. This is as good as it gets.”
He’s right, you know.