Matagorda Bay

After more than twenty years of traveling the state of Texas in search of a new great spot to catch fish, it is getting increasingly difficult to find a spot that really gets my attention. I have visited basically every large and small bass fishery Texas has to offer and managed to come away with my fair share of memories and stories to share. Unfortunately, most of the time I spent on these waters was trying to find a place where the fishing pressure was light. The old saying that keeping a good fishery a secret seems to be true. At least I thought it was until last week.

Saltwater fishing has been one of my favorite types of fishing due to many reasons. Typically saltwater fish tend to bite better than freshwater fish. The bag limits are generous and there is no telling what you will catch when you toss out an offering. Combine this with the vast areas of inland bay fishing and it’s no wonder that interest and participation in saltwater fishing is growing much more rapidly than freshwater fishing.

Last week I had my first opportunity to visit Matagorda, Texas as a guest of David Cassady who owns and operates The Full Stringer Lodge. David had approached me several months ago with an invitation to fish the only bay system in Texas that I had never fished. His enthusiasm and his professionalism was enough to entice me to at least give the Matagorda area a chance.

Getting to Matagorda is something that you don’t do by accident. It is literally at the end of the road and after a half hour wait for the drawbridge to close, I made my way to the lodge. Matagorda is just north of Port O’Connor and South of Galveston. The water is deeper than that of the lower coast and has an obvious void of vegetation. Although this area is legendary for producing huge speckled trout, I was there to experience fishing for a variety of species other than trout.

The first night was exhausting as my guide Mark Talasek took me floundering. It was a challenge to pick out the flounder hiding in the water, but after a couple of hours I had it down. The winds were non-existent that evening and as we motored our special gigging boat in water less than eight inches deep. With lights mounted on the front of the rig, the bottom was brightly lit. Baitfish were literally everywhere and it seems like a miracle that fishermen can catch anything on artificial lures when the bait is as plentiful as it was. In addition to flounder, we saw hundreds of stingrays littering the bottom, sheep head, mullet and of course big redfish (which are not legal to take with a gig). With a limit of ten flounder per person it didn’t take long to finish this night expedition.

Early the next morning we couldn’t pass up a chance to try for speckled trout. The first fish boated measured more than 25 inches. . A friend of mine wanted to go to one of the nearby offshore rigs and try his luck. The day before, his guide had boated fourteen different species of fish from this one rig. Meanwhile, I opted to try for a fish I new little about; the tripletail.

I joined up with Captain Lee Warmke aboard a boat called The Half-breed. After a brief explanation of exactly what we would be doing, we headed south towards the Port O’Connor area. The area we stopped at was around 12 feet deep and there were dozens of gas platforms that provided shade that these tripletail would be using to ambush their bait. While Lee idled the boat to the right, his partner captain Jesse Arsola handed me a stout rod and reel, tipped with a big shrimp under a floating cork. “Toss it in the shade under the rig and hold on. When he bites, I’ll slam the boat in reverse to pull him from the rig, otherwise he’ll break the line”, said Warmke. Seconds later I watched the cork disappear and was holding on to the rod with both hands and trying to find a place on the boat that would keep me from falling out. After a ten-minute fight, the fifteen-pound tripletail fish was landed. The next rig produced two more tripletail with the smallest being twelve pounds. Then I broke off one that would go well over twenty pounds. By now my shoulders and arms felt like I had been drug behind the boat water skiing. We headed back in.

My friend met me at the Lodge and I could tell he had a fish story as well. “We had a tarpon on for almost two hours. Once we got it to the boat, we didn’t know what to do with it, so we let it go and I’ve got about a hundred pictures to prove it,” he said. Besides the tarpon, his group had caught snapper, ling, shark and a variety of other offshore species.

Although this trip to Matagorda was short, it was enough to reschedule another visit. My friend is going back too. “I can’t believe that I’ve lived in Texas all my life and never fished here before. This has to be one of the best kept secrets on the coast,” he said. I have to agree, but my job is to make sure that the secret gets out.

For more information about the fishing opportunities in the Matagorda area, contact David Cassady at the Full Stringer Lodge (979) 863-1143.