A Surf Fishing Story From Texas

My friend and I decided to go down to Port Isabel and surf fishing while making our way up to the jetties at Port Mansfield. We had not faced this area before and wanted to try out a new spot. We had heard lots of fishing stories and wanted to find out if they were just Fishing Tales (a Steve you like the way I fit in that key word for you.). Not long after we arrived we found that the surf conditions were much different than we were used to. The water was clean and blue it also dropped off into deeper water much quicker than many places along the Texas upper coast. As we worked our way up the beach toward Port Mansfield we found schools of Spanish Mackerel, Skip Jack and even a few small Tarpon.

As we pulled up to the Mansfield jettes the weather had turned sour but not bad, so we set up to go surf fishing for Redfish (Red Drum). I will not go into the details of how many we can't because I have not a clue, we lost track before the weather conditions turned even worse. We took note of the fact that we had moved back away from the shoreline twice and about that time we realized that there was a small area that we had gone through our way up that was a bit tricky. This tricky spot consisted of an area of surf that came very close to the dunes. In fact we had to time hour passage for the third wave that came in, it seemed as though every third wave did not come in as far as the two proceeding waves. As we looked to our south we could see that that take your area had waves breaking into the dunes, you can see our dilemma. The Mansfield cut would not allow us to go north and we were not sure if we could get through to the south.

There were two other groups of fishermen in the area and we all decided to travel together in hopes of being of assistance if one got in trouble. As we approached the dunes we found that they had been washed out enough that we felt like we may be able to ride the edge of the dunes even though it was quite a steep angle. At one point the truck in front of me snap a picture of a wave breaking over the top of my truck and I do not mean the hood. I really wish I had that photo but he never sent it to me anyway what should have taken 1 hour to drive took 4 hours. We were in the water the whole way and in some spots the trucks had water seeping in the doors in fact one spot I had 2 inches of water on the floorboard. So I guess the lesson to be learned is no matter how good the fishing is paying attention to the weather. We learned some other things during that trip but I will leave them for a the story sometime in the future. This fishing trip was the birth of just one of my many fishing tales.