One of the best ways to catch more trout is to wade the shallow flats of Port O’Connor. Capt. Robert Sloan specializes in wade fishing charters in West Matagorda and Espiritu Santo bays.

The unique thing about wading is that it’s a total escape from the real world. Once you get away from the boat you are on your own. It’s you, the water and the fish.
Veteran waders know from experience that gearing up for hours of comfort in the water is not as simple as you might think. The intriguing thing about wade fishing is that you are on your own, but to do it right requires some forward thinking and gearing up with the right stuff.

From about May through October most waders go wet. But there are some that wear waders year-round due to the presence of a flesh-eating virus call Vibrio Vulnificus.
With over 40 years of wading the Gulf coast behind me I’ve found that stocking foot waders are the best way to go. They are comfortable and when combined with a pair of wading boots can be worn all day. Lightweight chest waders are best. They can be worn up over the chest or rolled down and secured with a belt around your waist.

My favorite waders are made by Simms. They are compact, lightweight, and comfortable. Plus, they easily convert to waist highs. Good waders will easily cost over a hundred bucks and can jump up in the $300 to $600 range. One thing is certain about waders – you get what you pay for. Custom fitted waders like Simms are worth their weight in gold.

Wading boots vary in quality and comfort. When selecting a pair of wading boots remember that you’ll need to get them two to three sizes larger than your street shoes. That‘s because you’ll be wearing socks, plus you’ve got to factor in the thickness of the stocking feet on your waders.

Wearing snake boots while wade fishing might seem kind of wacky but believe it or not they actually function pretty well on the flats. You see, most snake proof boots are also stingray proof. Contending with rays is something we have to do year-round. That’s especially true from the middle to lower Gulf coast where the water is usually warmer than the upper coastal areas in Texas.

The most popular wading boots made are Ray Guards by Foreverlast. They offer full protection from the knee down. They might be a little bit pricey but they completely take the worry out of getting hit, enduring big time pain and heading to the ER.

Part of the wade fishing line of gear is the belt. Used to be we would strap on an everyday belt around our waist and head out. On the belt might be a knife, a pair of needle nose pliers and a stringer. Over the past couple of decades wading belts have improved 100 percent. They offer back support, a tackle box pouch, a rod holder, a stringer clip, tool pouch and a D-ring attachment point. Some of the belts allow accessories to be moved to different positions for easy customization. A belt with a back-support system improves comfort during long wades. My go-to wading belt is the G2 by Foreverlast. It comes with everything but the kitchen sink and has great back support.
It’s the accessories that make a belt worth its cost. You definitely need a secure stringer holder that can easily be removed for stringing fish. By the way the latest and greatest stringer is called a Fish Slick Original. The 12-footer is best. Fish go on and come off easily thanks to the plastic finish on the leader. A tool pouch for a pair of needle nose pliers is mandatory. I like a wading belt that allows you to move the tackle box compartment around for easy access.

One last thing you’ll need is a floating landing net. It will put a lot more fish on your stringer.

Remember, always buy the best wading gear you can afford. It’ll last for years and the comfort of quality is priceless.

Capt. Robert Sloan is now booking wading trips from May through October. For details call 409 782 6796 or go to sloan288@aol.com, also check out www.luckystrikeguide.com.

Sheepshead Gold Cap & Hook

If ever a fish needed dental work, it would have to be the barnacle-crushing Sheepshead. I never thought I would actually catch a Sheepshead that seemed to already have had dental work done but the 2nd week in March proved me wrong. I had a hard time finding fish that day but tried to convince a new teenage angler on my boat that POC did have an abundance. When we finally got into some Sheepsheads, I warned her to keep her fingers clear of the mouth as a bite from one of these fish would definitely get her attention. As I was demonstrating how to remove a hook from her first fish of the day, I saw something shiny in the fish’s mouth. It appeared he had a gold cap on one of his back teeth. Between the fish’s fight against my lip clip and the fact he had swallowed the hook, I decided to put him in the cooler and figure out the gold cap when he was a little more docile. Once we got back to the boat dock, I decided it was time to check out this peculiar catch of the day. After prying his mouth open, there was indeed a gold cap on his back tooth. With my needle nose pliers, I was able to remove the cap. It appeared to be the brass from a firearm but I just wasn’t sure. I figured
Donny at POC Rod and Gun might be able to help me out and, after examining it, Donny identified it as a primer from a 410 shotgun shell. So, this is how I imagine it went down… While fishing, an angler fires a round out of his Taurus Judge revolver. The shell is ejected into the water and the primer cap is dislodged. A Sheepshead swims by and, loving shiny things, decides that this object must be super tasty. The Sheepshead slurps it up and before swallowing it, chomps down just right so the cap covers his back tooth perfectly. Now the Sheepshead thinks it’s terribly annoying until all the ladies start noticing and think his new grill is super cool. Unfortunately for him, he hits my live shrimp, gets thrown into my cooler and, well, the rest is history

Leah and her Sheepshead

This may be hard to understand for some fishermen and it’s not entirely true about me. I will try to explain it the best I can. When I started fishing at a young age, I wanted to catch lots and lots of fish. In my late teens and early 20s, I wanted the same, plus big fish. It seemed to me then, that you judged the success of your trip on how many and how big! Not to mention the competition side of it. It seemed that getting skunked meant that the whole trip was a failure.

Gradually, my outlook changed. I realized that even though a trip didn’t produce a lot of fish, I started noticing there was so much more than just the fish. When I go wade fishing, all my friends know that I am in the water and casting 20 to 30 minutes before the sky starts getting that faint glow off to the East.

All of these sunrises I have seen over the years are gifts and extra bonuses. I have seen hundreds and more likely, thousands of these sunrises in my life. Never one the same but always unique and beautiful. Ducks flying so close, you can hear the wings and swishing through the air. A porpoise busting up a school of trout in pursuit of a meal. Just the sites and sounds of everything coming to life along with the rising sun is something else. All of these and many more are out there.

I no longer have a failed or bad day. I will tell you the truth, I usually always caught fish, but Capt. Mike had those days when the fish had total lockjaw! Even the best will tell you that there will be those days! Nowadays, If I am on the water casting and watching everything around me, my trip is a big success even before the first hook up! I will never grow tired of that tap, setting the hook and the head shake and tail dance of a nice speck trying to spit your hook. Only now there is so much more to add to my love of fishing.

I wrote a book and wanted to get a sunrise picture for my cover. My nephew is a photographer and took the picture. We left the dock at 5:10 am and got to a fishing spot in the East Pocket of Powderhorn Lake. A friend and I got in the water and started slingin’ assassins, my nephew close behind with tripod and camera. Ended up getting a great picture with me in it and fighting a good red fish.

The title of my book is “Fishing the Golden Waters of the Texas Gulf Coast.” I named it that because of the gold shimmering across the water as the sun rises. I always tell people that this our version of “On Golden Pond.” Only, we have a very big pond.

Mike at age 19, with shark he caught off Henry Apostolo’s shrimp boat.

About Michael Fossati.
.
I was born and raised in Victoria Texas and still live there today. From a very young age, I loved fishing. My grandfather had a house in Port O’Connor. We loved going down to Port O’Connor. My cousin and I fished on the old pier that was there in the sixties. We also fished Boggy Bayou and other places. I just got to where I loved fishing so much. I would fish salt or fresh water, didn’t matter.

Grandpa’s house in POC was on second and Madison. It was almost leveled in Hurricane Carla, but rebuilt and today is owned by my cousin. My mom and dad were good friends of all the Apostalos in POC. I remember Alec, Henry and Tony Apostalo. I just recently came across John Apostalo on Facebook and hadn’t seen or talked to him in over 40 years. I remember going on Henry’s shrimp boat with my dad. Later on when I was 19, I caught a big shark off Henry’s shrimp boat.

As I got older, my roots took hold in the saltwater and is where they remain today. Don’t care much about fishing fresh water. I have fished the POC area all my life and also the Indianola/Magnolia Beach area in the last 25 years. My mom and dad built a house on Powderhorn Lake. I have fished the back bays of POC and offshore. I have guided some, but now I just like to go with family and friends. My book talks mostly about fishing in POC and Indianola.

My book, “Fishing the Golden Waters of the Texas Gulf Coast”, can be purchased by contacting me at 361 308 0613; by email at mikefishing4fun@gmail.com, or on my Facebook group: Texas Strong Coastal Fishermen.

Fishing at the Port O’Connor Pier, Justin, age 9, caught his first bonnethead shark and Kyle, age 7, caught a puffer fish.

Casey & Her Redfish

As a kid I loved to fish. It didn’t matter to me where I got to fish or what I used for equipment or tackle or where we went, the only thing that mattered to me is that I got to cast a fishing rod into the body of water and maybe, just maybe, I would be lucky enough to get a bite! Usually I had a round bobber, you know the kind, the red and white ones with that nifty spring loaded piston where you could latch the line top and bottom, and I would watch the action on the bobber like my life depended on it, hoping for a tug or better yet, a take down indicating only one thing, FISH!

There were many times when I was fortunate enough to have my dad take me out fishing. Fresh water lake trips early on but then later we began to fish the salt water. While I loved the perch and bass we caught no matter the size in the fresh water, I had no idea what was to become of me once I tasted the salt water with its abundance of fish and other critters that were so willing to devour whatever bait offerings we were able to both afford and find. You see my dad had a love of the salt water as well and he took us kids any chance he got, sometimes all of us and other times just me, whoever would not pretend to be asleep at 5AM would get to go. I can still hear his tip toes in the house trying to keep all but the eager asleep as he whispered in my ear…”Stephen, hey Hambones, you want to go fishing?”

Fast forward to today and if you are sleeping in my house and showed interest in getting up early to fish, you can bet my tip toes sound very similar to those of ole dad! Why do fishermen insist on getting up so early anyway? I often ask myself the same question as my alarm nowadays wakes me somewhere in the neighborhood of 4:30 AM. I think it’s because in those old days my dad had to build in time to get his sleepy anglers to come to life and wake up enough to help put at least some of the gear together. Not to mention we had to pull the boat thirty miles and then get in line to get live shrimp and launch the boat and park the car and trailer and to make sure we had all our gear. Inevitably my dad had it all together but one of us boys or my sisters held up the show by forgetting something like our life jacket, or we were wandering off at the ramp chasing seagulls or crabs, or talking to another guy bothering them asking where the fish were. It was surely a show and I can still smell the salty humid air and hear the gulls cackling and making all kinds of noise.

The Saturday morning trips would find us heading to Galveston and over Bolivar Roads via the ferry. Most of the times we went fishing and travelled via ferry fell between my eight and twelve years of life. We didn’t have a boat until I was a teen but I cherished the walks on the North Jetty (except for having to carry my body weight in rods, coolers and other gear) because we were right there in the middle of the action, hopping rocks all the way out to what I thought was over a mile walk. Along the way we would pass anglers of every age and kind all with an excited chatter of what they were going to catch and commenting on how neat it was for my dad to be taking us out on the rocks to catch fish. Most of the time I admit my brother and I were more interested in the goings on between the rocks like the crabs, the myriad of bay trash that had been caught up in the cracks and the other anglers and what they may be catching, to be too focused on catching our own fish. Our method was to cast out and get as far as possible from the rocks then place the rod in a crack to hold it and then take off in another direction to see what entertainment was there to find. I can bet my dad watched our method and shook his head thinking “these kids don’t get it!”

Those were great times and like I said I can still remember them forty years later like they were yesterday. Eventually we were able to get a boat which had a name on the side of it called the Lynn Ellen after the man’s kids we bought it from. We never changed the name which was kind of strange but I guess it might be bad luck to rename a boat? Anyway the funny thing about this is that we again went through the entire routine I mentioned of waking up, gearing up and now getting the boat ready. We went to Galveston like before and even launched the boat out of near where we would board the ferry. Only this time we had our own boat to get over to the North Jetties. Here’s the part that makes me smile though is no matter where we anchored up we cast our lines toward the rocks trying to get as close as possible because we figured that is where the best fish must be. Strange how when we were jetty walkers we tried to cast away as far but as boaters now we tried to cast as close! Oh well!

The point is as a kid it didn’t matter how close or how far we fired a line through the air away or toward the rocks, the important thing was we were fishing, and therein lies a lifelong quest. Tomorrow I will guide three anglers with high hopes of casting a line and angling a fish and to me that is no different of a mindset than I had as a kid.

We all become childlike at times on the salt water. It’s the excitement of the possibilities that we cannot fully harness that makes us this way. Think about it do you ever begin a fishing trip with anything less than unbridled giddiness? I think not, in fact we have a name for those who might think that way, they are called land lubbers. Fishermen and women are anglers and to be around this group of folks is to be in the more positive thinkers in any generation. Just try to hang out around a bait camp before the sun comes up and find anyone gearing up for a day on the water with less than bright eyes and high hopes as they hurry towards firing up that boat motor or taking that mile walk out on the jetties. You will likely find enthusiasm abounds.