Fishing is kind of weird

 

Capt. Mike O’Dell reports that he’s catching fish, but it’s kind of weird. O’Dell fished the Upper Laguna and Redfish Bay last weekend.

“Kind of weird…everything is a month or six weeks behind what it was last year. Out of all the trout I caught during four days of fishing, I caught only three females. Out of probably 30-40 redfish that I saw at the cleaning tables there were only three or four that had anything in their bellies. To me that says those fish should be eating.

He says most of the trout he’s catching are on the bottom in deep water along reefs, 6-8 feet deep. “If you work the bait very much they won’t touch it. It’s more like a hard head bite. We never did get just a slammer, and we had some 21 – 22 inch trout.”

He and his clients are freelining piggy perch. He uses 5/0 Razor Sharp hooks, hooking the piggies on top, not in their underside. “The only time I use a Carolina rig is in a hard current, just to slow my bait down.”

O’Dell was dodging showers and fishing in a north wind all weekend. He says the Corpus area received five inches of rain; Nueces got hammered.

“It blew out of the north and rolled over to the west,” continued O’Dell. “When we have a west wind down here, we just back up and punt. We don’t get a west wind that often and nobody knows how to fish it. We are used to the east, south, southeast wind, or a north wind.”