Fly Fishing the Texas Flats

Ladyfish (Skipjack)

In Texas, ladyfish can turn up in bays, estuaries, channels, and flats and around piers and jetties from Sabine Pass to Port Isabel. They will take flies and other artificials aggressively and will take to the air when they are not making sizzling runs.

Ladyfish fill the Padre Island surf in vast numbers during the late summer and early fall, going on feeding sprees that in turn attract flocks of terns and gulls. Suggested fly patterns range from poppers to streamers to shrimp imitations. Durability is the most important quality in fly selection. It is a good idea to use a bite tippet for ladyfish. Twenty-pound monofilament is fine, but the line should be checked and retied often.

Many fly fishers scale down to 5- and 6-weight rods to get the most fight out of ladyfish. On the lower Laguna Madre, ladyfish can provide fast midday action after trout and redfish have dropped into deeper, cooler water, says South Padre Island guide Eric Glass. "I would venture that you cannot fish a whole day here in the summer and not hook a ladyfish," he says.

"We don't have big freshwater inflows, but we have little tidal streams or guts that drain off barren, desolate flats. You can go up in them on a falling tide in the summer, when there is just a slight current trickling off the flat, and somehow a school of ladyfish has found it." Glass says he also looks for ladyfish on the back side of South Padre Island, where they patrol the edge of white sand flats in clear water. "They look like bonefish," he says. "They are hard to see and they run real fast."

Flounder

More and more Texas fly fishers are discovering how much fun it is to take flounder on a fly. They are learning where to find the fish and developing techniques to take them more frequently. Flounder get good reviews for their spunk on light tackle.

"They are better fighters than trout and can be a load on an 8-weight," says Brad Smythe, a Rockport guide who frequently puts his fly-fishing clients on flounder. A feeding flounder doesn't make a crashing sound, a big splash up on the shoreline. Instead, it does a flop on the surface. You can be poling down a bank line and something will catch your eye, and it will be a flatfish doing the patented flounder flop.

A strange sight, it is over in an instant and there is rarely a good long look. What the flounder is doing is flopping on a baitfish to stun it, so that the flounder can easily take it off the surface. Flounder are often found along the edges of channels and inlets and around troughs and depressions. Fly fishers will often spot flounder when they are being poled down shorelines.

Flounder don't always demand a tedious, bottom-bumping retrieve. They lie on the bottom, waiting for their prey, but they can be as agile and aggressive in taking a fly as trout or redfish. With a serious set of teeth and a powerful tail that enables them to cover a short distance like a flash, flounder can compete for a passing fly on an equal scale with any other inshore game fish.

And like other game fish, they have their moods, experts say. Sometimes you have to put the fly 5 inches in front of them, and other times they will go, as one guide put it, "from elevation zero to 4 feet in the blink of an eye" to get at your offering.

Rockport guide Smythe, who fishes the backcountry waters behind San Jose and Matagorda islands, tracks flounder movements by the tide and wind conditions. "When water is blown out of tidal lakes, flounder move off and stack up on shorelines behind barrier islands," he says. "It makes it much easier to take them on a fly because they are concentrated in shallow water on a specific shoreline."

Flounder can be identified also by the mud that they stir up on a bottom. It is distinct from the mud made by a redfish or a seatrout. A departing redfish will make the mud boil and leave a mud streak on either side, whereas a trout will slither off, making only a slight disturbance in the mud. Flounder, in contrast, will make distinct puffs in the mud that look like a series of boils.

Houston fly fisher Gonzalo Vargas says he looks for those signs when tracking big flounder around creek mouths along the lower Laguna Madre. "Sometimes you have to be very patient and get the fly within a 5-inch feeding range," Vargas says. "But if you see a mud puff, that is your flounder."

Any conversation on fly selections for flounder ultimately gets around to the Clouser Deep Minnow pattern. However, different conditions and different times of the year will dictate flies with different sink rates that can work the water column from top to bottom. Cary's Mud Minnow, designed by Dallas fly fisher Cary Marcus, is a fat-profiled fly tied with Krystal Flash that does an excellent job of imitating the killifish, a favorite target of flounder, especially during fall runs.

Finding flounder is always going to be the toughest riddle for the fly fisher to solve. But whether it's a 14-inch male or an 8-pound "saddle blanket" female, there are lots of flounder along the Texas coast, waiting on the bottom for the right fly to go by.

© Article copyright Pruett Publishing.