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IT WAS A BAD DAY to be a mullet in South Bay. A vast school of the finny vegetarians had congregated in this little offshoot bay of Lower Laguna Madre, and every predator in the vicinity
I had joined Captain Gilbert Vela, his wife Terry, and their longtime friend Monique Hensler on a morning foray into South Bay to see if there was any activity worth casting to. Vela pointed his rod tip at the school of harassed mullet. "Monique, cast over there," he said. "That's a good fish." Without hesitation, Monique cast a bone/silver Top Dog just beyond the nervous water and began a fast-cadence walk back through the school. Mullet scattered, there was a loud ker-chug!, and Monique was fast to a broad-shouldered, 35-inch snook. The big robalo jumped twice and rattled its gills. It bulled toward the mangroves, but Monique turned it just short. The fish cartwheeled one more time and the Berkley Big Game 10pound line snapped. Over the course of the next two hours or so, the Velas and Monique hooked, landed,
liberated plug with a net. "He wants us to come to play some more." For years, the snook that swam Lower Laguna Madre were fish of near-mythical status. People claimed to know someone who knew someone that had caught one. Some had even hooked one of the line-sided denizens of tangles, snags, and other forms of structure, only to lose the beast at the boat. An occasional lucky soul would even land one, promptly release it, and thus condemn himself to hours of trying to convince his buddies that he caught a honest-to-goodness snook. The story of the snook is a classic tale of boon-bust-recovery. According to a Texas Parks & Wildlife department article by Randy Blankenship, former Lower Laguna Madre Ecosystem Leader (now with the National Marine Fisheries Service), the snook was a commercially important species
was plowing into it with abandon. Pods of mullet skipped and flew from unseen attackers in desperate attempts to avoid becoming breakfast. A small group of mullet tried to find shelter among the Snook in Texas have a classic tale of boom-bust-boom. Commercially viable in the 40s, hard to find in recent decades, they are now making a healthy rebound.
mangrove trees that lined the north end of the bay, only to get strafed by something among the roots. 28 |
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along the Western Gulf and released six snook Coast as late as the 1940s. to 25 inches, and a "Commercial snook landnice slot redfish that ings ... reached 230,000 went into the ice Texas Snook Comeback pounds landed in Port Isabel chest. Every so in 1928," Blankenship wrote. often, we heard the big snook jump and shake its head. Just before From that point on, landings decreased in size we pulled up stakes ahead of a storm front, until no commercial harvest of snook were the same bone/silver Top Dog floated by the reported beyond 1961. Snook weren't just plentiful, they grew to boat. "See that," Vela said as he scooped up the record sizes. The state record snook weighed
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PHOTO: NODEROG ISTOCK