Keep Freeze-Surviving Trout Off Your Stringers

NONE OF US will ever forget this past February’s freeze. In addition to killing people and wildlife and plants statewide, it also exposed the greed and self-absorption of people who don’t care much about Texas’s coastal fisheries.

I’ll concede that our coastal anglers were not legally bound after the freeze to stop targeting speckled trout, nor required by law to quit laying trout fillets on the grill. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department did reduce the daily bag along roughly the southern half of the coast from five fish to three, but they left the number up my way at five.

By not changing the bag limit statewide, by not seriously considering (publicly) a temporary moratorium on retention of trout, TPWD sent a message that almost nothing had changed. They implied we could continue down the same path we had followed prior to this brutal weather event.

Almost immediately after the minimal changes were announced, lines were drawn. I want to believe that most experienced fishermen leaned my way and ignored TPWD’s well intended, but misleading generosity and that we opted instead to lay off taking trout altogether for a while. That, undeniably, would have given the remaining stock time to spawn at least once and expedite the species’ recovery.

On the other side were fishermen, mostly younger people from my observation (but not many folks are older than me anymore), who couldn’t wait to get back to stringing speckled trout. They were offered no reason to be conservative, especially along the upper Texas coast, because they perceived TPWD’s favorable assessment of the surviving trout population and subsequent instruction to stay the course as indicative of there being nothing wrong.

That finding, however, doesn’t take into account the extreme difficulty and high potential for inaccuracy in the counting of live saltwater fish—or even dead ones—especially when every coastal angler in Texas is demanding right-now answers.

Under pressure after the freeze from impatient Texas fishermen who wanted definitive numbers and guidelines, TPWD raced dozens of wardens and biologists to the coast to count dead fish.

Given the sense of urgency surrounding that project, their counts were about as good as could be expected. However, I have great confidence and good evidence that they missed dead trout. Lots of them—especially along the upper coast.

That’s not a knock on TPWD staff—hindsight’s always so clear—as much as it is a recommendation that when the next fish-killing freeze happens, we give the department reasonable time to make its assessments and draw its conclusions.

Back here in a more optimistic present, now five months removed from the event, I do see things returning to normal. Temperatures in the 90s are reminder enough that every Texas winter is followed by a Texas summer. The world’s still turning, all fish still are spawning, and our speckled trout population is in recovery.

People are catching fish. We’re all catching trout, at least those of us who know where to look and what to throw.

In a sidebar, I’m forever tickled by anglers’ incessant hue and cry over any proposed reduction in the bag limit on speckled trout. No matter the limit through recent decades, 20 when we were forced start counting, then 10 and now five, the average licensed coastal angler who targets speckled trout for the day returns with one.

Whatever the limit, though, there’s always someone who sees that magic number of fish on a stringer as a measure of their skills behind a rod and reel. Who’s really better, though? The angler who worked all day to catch five “beepers” (barely keepers) and put them all on the cleaning table, or the fisherman who caught and released 30 trout to six pounds before lunch, trailered the boat and went home to catch a baseball game?

During my Sunday radio show on May 2, I came up with an idea to show our support for conservation, especially of speckled trout just now but generally of all Texas fisheries. Instead of posting a photo of dead specks on a cleaning table, occasionally release all your trout that day and do this: Coil your stringer, set it down, and post a picture of that “zero” on social media captioned with, “This isn’t how many fish I caught today, but it’s how many I killed.”

We’ll never know how many trout we had before the February freeze, and we’ll never know how many we had on a specific day since. But whatever the true count on any given day, no matter how many speckled trout actually swam in Texas that day, wouldn’t more be better?

Email Doug Pike at ContactUs@fishgame.com