It’s the end of another week today, and also the end of Spring Break for most Texans. So after a pretty hectic couple of weeks, we are updating our Rockport Fishing Report. We will cover what all we saw on the water this past week, and also what we expect as we close out the month of March and move on to April.
We’ve finally had a solid week of sunshine and warmer weather down here on the Texas Coast. And it was about damn time! This did great things for our fishing, compared to our last couple of Rockport fly fishing reports. The water is warming up and so are the redfish. Fishing is finally where you would expect it to be this time of year. It’s really good!
In our last report, about a week ago, we had just gotten a bunch of water back. The tides had been hovering around their Winter lows for a good while, and we finally got our first Spring tide. We kind of expected that to hang around for the foreseeable future. Boy were we wrong. Ha! About 36 hours later, we were even lower than we were the prior week. A couple days of stout Northwest winds, and some strong tidal movements, and that water flushed outta here in a single night. Not the end of the world, just a little change in the plan.
But what it did do was suck all those fish back out of the further reaches and forced them into more open areas. The days after, we were seeing hundreds of fish each day. 50-60 shots were fairly common in a day, and large schools of reds were running all over the place. That made for some outstanding fishing. And it continued all the way through today.
As of the time of this report, the water is still very low. Although we do have some stronger Southeast winds now, which should help some of it come back a little. But the fishing today was still very good. Schools of reds are plentiful in the mornings. Some will be tailing, in the right spots. But most are just rushing down banks tearing up the food in front of them. As the sun gets higher, the fish are spreading out more and you will start seeing the larger fish swimming solo or a bunch of smaller schools of fish. But there is plenty of activity throughout the day.
The fish are absolutely gorging themselves on food. Very common to have the fish we are landing and handling puking up stuff all over the boat. In some zones you will see mostly grass shrimp coming out of their mouths. Other spots, some miles away, we had glass minnows coming out of every fish we landed this weekend. Their bellies were all full and they were still plenty happy to attack our flies.
The black/purple crab has been the go to this week for most of us. But it wasn’t the only thing working. Shrimp patterns worked just fine as well. Similarly to last week, the fish really weren’t too picky out there. The lone exception being, we did have a couple of our boats reporting that larger flies were often snubbed by otherwise happy fish. Not overly surprising, if they’ve eating a bunch of small shrimp and minnows. And we were finally able to throw some topwater stuff this week as well. Solo cruising fish were all over it on Friday, in slicked out conditions. JJ’s Pop Tart was the fly of choice that day for fish cruising with their backs out of the water. Man, we love Spring fishing!
The warm weather is here to stay now. So we are on the water every day now. The week coming is pretty darn windy though. Even a couple afternoons where we could see gusts up to 30 mils per hour. But other than that, it should be another fishy week down here on the Central Texas Coast. We will get after this week, and report back later with another Rockport fishing reports.
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