Wind blown trout (cool tip)

How many time has it been too windy to fish the main body of your favorite bay?

Probably far too many times to count.

I experience this Saturday as it was calm enough to fish Sabine Lake for about 15 minutes and then what was a semi-choppy morning turned brutal with winds gusting to 25 miles per hour.

Instead of going home, my partner Mike and I headed up the Sabine River and used what I have found can be a very productive means of fishing on windy days.

We found the windblown shoreline which was in this case the Texas side of the river that had lots of structure along the bank and a concentration of baitfish. I quickly whipped out my go-to rig for these scenarios which is an Abu Garcia Veritas spinning rod, which I rigged with a Super Caster 230 XL spinning reel from U.S. Reel finished off with 30-pound moss green Spiderwire Fluoro-Braid.

I threw a Gulp! Swimming Mullet under a three feet mono leader on an 1/8-ounce jighead. The real secret here is this was fished under a popping cork. I like the Paradise Popper X-Treme, which is in fact featured in my Floats for Flounder article in the Oct. edition of Texas Fish & Game.

I throw tight to the shoreline and pop three times, let the rig sit five seconds. Then repeat the process.

What happens is a lot of the smaller baitfish get pushed along the banks by the strong wind and trout will move up there to feed. So will reds. In whipping winds it is challenging to feel a rig on the bottom, however with a float you can easily make this technique happen and have an easy visual cue of a strike.

Keep in mind, the trout are not going to feed if the water is super murky. We got trout bites early on when the visibility was about 10 inches. Within an your that changed to about six inches and no trout. However, I did catch a nice red.

This is not the ideal method of catching trout by any strethch of the imagination but it certainly beats going home as you can see by the photos it works.