Conditions point to a memorable Memorial Day weekend for anglers.
Texas anglers tend to harbor ambivalent feelings toward Memorial Day weekend. This is understandable. Some of it comes from treading a careful line between the solemn, serious underpinning of the holiday — remembrance of those who lost their lives in service to this county — and the anything-butsolemn casting of the three-day weekend as the traditional kickoff of summer fishing/boating season.
But even that second part of the equation is a minefield of paradox.
The holiday weekend can provide truly outstanding fishing opportunities as sport fish in the state’s marine and inland waters crank up their metabolism and settle into predictable patterns after their frustratingly mercurial behavior during spring. Few times of the year can be so ripe with potential for both freshwater and saltwater anglers.
However, there are complicating issues.
Crowds are a big one. The long weekend typically sees the largest number of anglers and boaters on the water of any three-day period of the year. Labor Day, falling as it does during the sizzling zenith of a Texas summer, doesn’t come close. Dangerous weekend
All those boaters, many inexperienced and some with compromised mental faculties, can, and too often do, exhibit behavior that frustrates anglers and ruins fishing potential. Or worse. Memorial Day weekend is one of the most dangerous of the year for boaters, and it’s a rare one that doesn’t see at least a handful of serious boating accidents. Anglers who hit the water on Memorial Day weekend have to be long-suffering at the ramp and on the water and pay particularly careful attention to boating safety. It can get crazy out there, especially on some of the inland waters near major cities.
Then, there’s the weather. Late May can be a dream for fishing and boating, with mild temperatures and light winds and sunny skies that make a day on the water a pleasure. Or it can be a nightmare, with torrential rain, flooding, high winds and rough conditions that make fishing dangerous or unproductive or both. Memorial Day weekend regularly manifests this Jekyll and Hyde behavior. Just two years ago, parts of Texas, including the Houston area but especially the region along the Blanco River, suffered a tremendously deadly flood on Memorial Day weekend. And other Memorial Days have seen dangerous, even deadly weather rake the state.
Memorial Day weekend can go either way for Texas anglers. It can be memorable in good or bad ways.
This one is shaping up to be one of the former.
Heading into the threeday weekend, prospects for Texas’ 2 million or so anglers appear almost wholly positive. Fishing has been good — outstanding, really — almost across the board, from coastal bays to inland reservoirs and rivers. And the weather appears likely to cooperate, too.
Texas’ saltwater anglers have plenty of reasons to look forward to the coming long weekend. Fishing along the length of the Texas coast has been very good and getting better over the past weeks.
Sabine Lake on the Texas/Louisiana border has seen excellent fishing for speckled trout and redfish over the past two weeks. Water clarity and salinity levels in the borderstraddling bay system have improved as inflows from the Neches and Sabine rivers have slowed. Earlier this week, anglers fishing the bay’s southern and eastern reaches reported very good mixed catches of redfish and speckled trout. Some of the best catches came by drifting flats holding scattered schools of mullet or small menhaden. Anglers concentrating on the bay’s marsh-rimmed eastern shoreline, working the mouth of bayous and drains with jig/soft-plastic combinations or soaking live shrimp or mud minnows, have taken good numbers of flounder.
“It’s been one of the best Mays I’ve seen,” James Smithfield, a Sabine Lake regular, reported earlier this week. “And they’re not just in one area; we’ve caught fish on the flats, in the marsh and on the jetties. The wind’s been a problem some days. But when it’s down, it’s ‘on.’ “
The same applies to areas of Galveston Bay. East Galveston Bay’s openwater reefs have produced trout when winds have been down, with anglers taking fish by drifting and working jig/soft-plastics or anchoring and using live shrimp under popping corks. When wind’s been up, waders working topwaters and soft-plastics along protected shorelines, especially along the bay’s marshy south shore, have scored trout and redfish.
Water clarity in East Bay is good, and it’s been improving in the lower reaches of Trinity Bay, where reefs are holding good number of trout as well as a number of black drum.
Flounder have filtered back into the bay systems after their winter offshore, and giggers have reported good success in West Galveston, San Antonio and Aransas bay systems. Even with a dark moon this holiday weekend — “new moon” is tonight — flounder stabbers should continue to see good success if tides and water clarity cooperate.
The Matagorda Bay system may be the hottest fishery on the Texas coast, heading into Memorial Day weekend. Speckled trout fishing in West Matagorda Bays has been outstanding this spring, with the bay producing strong numbers of specks measuring 25 inches or more.
Guide Bink Grimes reported the bay system’s “in as good a shape as I can remember” — excellent water clarity and an abundance of shrimp, menhaden, mullet and other forage. Thanks to the warmer than normal spring, the bay’s fish are already in their summer pattern, Grimes said. Water temperatures in costal bays are already holding over 80 degrees, something that traditionally doesn’t happen until June.
Drifting flats holding a mix of sand and submerged or working open-water reefs has produced trout weighing as much as 7 pounds. When wind has been too stiff to fish open water, anglers haven’t missed a beat; wading leeward shorelines and chunking topwaters or soft-plastics has produced trout and redfish, Grimes reported. Freshwater success
Freshwater anglers have been enjoying similar good fishing that promises to hold into the holiday weekend.
Lake Livingston is white-hot for white bass. Guide Simon Cosper reported huge schools of whites holding around submerged structure in the expanse of open water south of the Highway 190 bridge. The whites, which have been concentrating around humps, ridges and other structure topping out in 15-20 feet of water adjacent to deeper water, have been slamming slab spoons jigged around the structure. Anglers able to locate a “hot” school of white bass are landing their 25-fish daily limit with little trouble.
The white bass are shadowing clouds of threadfin shad. Any day, Cosper said, those submerged white bass schools will begin shoving swarms of whites to the surface, where they’ll tear into them. When that happens — and there already have been a few brief flurries of surface-schooling action on Livingston — anglers will be able to spot the fish busting water (or see gulls hovering over the feeding fish, picking off stray shad) and enjoy fisha-cast action.
“White bass fishing’s as good as I’ve ever seen it on Livingston,” Cosper said.
Largemouth bass, the state’s most popular freshwater game fish?
Well, the results of the Toyota Bassmaster Elite Texas Fest bass tournament on Sam Rayburn Reservoir this past weekend offers an idea of how good it is heading into Memorial Day.
Anglers in the tournament caught bass by the heaps, and did it using a wide variety of lures, fishing shallow and deep and in between. Pro angler Brandon Palaniuk won the tournament, which benefits Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s fishing programs, with a four-day, 20-bass total of 93 pounds, 12 ounces. That’s an average of just over 4.75 pounds per fish. Plenty of options
Palaniuk caught his fish on a variety of lures. Some he caught on a topwater fished along the edge of matted vegetation in shallow water. Others, including an 8-pound, 4-ounce behemoth, hit Neko-rig and Texas-rig plastic worms fished deep, around standing timber or brush piles.
Palaniuk said he caught bass in water as shallow as 4 feet and as deep as 30 feet. That’s a good indication that many bass anglers stand a good chance of catching fish this weekend using their favorite lures and favorite techniques. And if bass are hitting topwaters, why would you fish anything else? There is no more enjoyable way to catch largemouths.
Bass — largemouths and whites — aren’t the only freshwater fish cooperating. Catfish are still shallow, following the last of the spawning threadfin shad in the shallows or gravitating to areas holding logs, rocks or other structure where the cavity-nesting cats are beginning their own spawning season.
The same applies to sunfish — bluegills, redears and other “perch” — gathering in the shallows, building nests and aggressively gobbling any bait put in front of them.
Weather for Memorial Day weekend looks almost as good as the fishing prospects. Warm and sunny, with fairly light winds and only a minor chance of scattered showers and maybe a thunderstorm or two on Memorial Day.
This could be a truly memorable Memorial Day weekend for Texas anglers. shannon.tompkins@chron.com twitter.com/chronoutdoors