Sargent (8/19-8/20)

I went fishing with two graduate students from my department. Both have recently passed their qualifying exams and were ready to party like Ph.D. candidates. We left Houston around 4:00 and arrived at the Cedar lakes cut with enough daylight to catch bait and pick a camping spot. Conditions were not quite what I hoped. The wind was blowing between 10-15mph. The surf was brown and very choppy. The tide was very low and still going out.

We drove back down the beach several hundred yards from the cut. Kasey helped me set up the rods and take the lines out. Colin grabbed his camera, binoculars, and bird book and disappeared. Fishing was very slow at first but around 11pm I noticed that the tide had stopped falling and was starting to rise again. This got me a little more motivated since I didn’t believe the fishing could get any worse.

The surf was too heavy for kayaking so Kasey and I crossed the chest deep second gut and casted from the third bar. Every time we made the perilous journey we swore it would be the last. Even with the light of a full moon it is creepy as hell out there. Around 1:30am one of the clickers started screaming. I tightened the drag down and handed the rod to Kasey. The fish fought very hard and I was sure it was a shark but it turned out to be a 40” red. Not bad for his first redfish!

A short time later I heard a quick burst of line come off my far rod that had a small chunk of cut bait in the second gut. I caught up to the fish and beached a 27” red. I love it when you catch big fish and dinner. At 3am we reeled the lines in and called it a night.

We got a late start on Saturday morning but still managed to soak baits for a couple of hours. At 11am we started to pack the gear up and reel the lines in. Two lines were tangled pretty badly but it turned out that Kasey’s line had a redfish on it. I was tempted to fish more but it was getting too hot. Colin came back from birdwatching and reported that he had positively identified 36 different species.