Jigs, top-waters for Sabine jetty trout, reds Federal snapper opener produces

By Robert Sloan

For Lone Star outdoor newS

The Sabine jetties don’t get a lot of recognition, which is fine with the locals who enjoy the lack of fishing pressure along the set of granite rocks on the Texas/Louisiana border.

Catches of trout and reds are better than most be lieve. And, since there is little live bait to be found or caught, nearly all of the fish here are hooked on lures. There is a catch, however. If you’re fishing on the Gulf side of the east Sabine jetty, you will need a Loui siana fishing license. When fishing the channel side of the east and west jetties, you just need a Texas li cense.

“I like to get an early start when fishing the jetties,” guide Jerry Norris said. “That’s when the top-water bite is best, and that’s also when you’ll most likely catch the bigger trout. The main thing is to look for green water. Sometimes it’ll be on the channel side of the rocks, but there are plenty of days when the most productive water will be on the Gulf side of the jetties.”

Norris said the key is to find a moving green tide that’s holding lots of mullet.

“What I like to do is idle my boat into what looks like good water,” he said. “Then I’ll control my posi tion along the rocks with a trolling motor. It’s usually best to stay at least a long cast off the rocks, but there are times when I’ll move in closer to the jetty and ease along while fishing soft plastic jigs anywhere from 3 feet to about 10 feet deep.”

Norris’ favorite jig is a 5-inch shad Assassin, fol lowed by a 4-inch split-tail shad. Because the water along the jetties isn’t all that deep, he’ll normally fish jigs about 7 feet deep up close to the rocks.

When the water heats up, he’ll then rig on 1/4-ounce, screw-lock jig heads with a short shaft and a wide gap. He says the faster sink rate triggers more bites from both reds and trout.

Austin Dishman, who has also been fishing the Sa bine jetties for years, favors fishing at the end of the east jetty to start.

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Tagging speckled trout

For Lone Star outdoor newS

Trout Tagging Texas is an organization and program that is actively tagging and releasing speckled trout caught along the Texas coast in order to study their migration patterns, movements, growth rates and populations. Its founder, Chris McKinley, is an avid, passionate, conservationminded angler who wanted to push for a change in coastal fisheries.

McKinley grew up near Bay City and has been in the Sargent and Matagorda areas for more than 20 years.

“Anglers still catch a lot of speckled trout up and down the coast, and big ones, too,” McKinley said. “But overall, things are not the same when compared to 10, 20 and 30 years ago. This has been especially true, at least in my opinion, since the major freeze event occurred back in February 2021. Like anybody else, I’d love nothing more than to see the quality of our speckled trout fishery improve, and I feel that practicing catch-and-release could play a major role in making that happen.”

Back in the wintertime, McKinley caught a large speckled trout that measured 31 inches and weighed 9 pounds, and it got him wondering about how many trout of that caliber were swimming around in Texas bays.

“It just really made me wonder how many times that fish had been caught before,” he said. “I wanted to know if we were catch- ing the same fish over and over again. That’s when I decided I wanted to start tagging and releasing fish to track their movements and behaviors.”

McKinley took some time to research the best way to go about his idea, which led to the first Trout Tagging Texas speckled trout getting tagged in February of 2023. The efforts have only snowballed ever since.

The program uses four different colored tags for speckled trout that are 15 inches or longer. Specks that are caught, tagged and released on the upper coast have an orange tag. Middle coast specks are being tagged with a yellow-colored tag, and the lower coast tags are green. Fish that are caught, tagged and released in the surf have a red tag.