Lazy Afternoon

After our pier fishing on Friday night and the prospect of a continued lower than normal tide, Tracy and I changed our original plan of an early morning trip to the salt to an afternoon ride for lunch in Matagorda and a short ride down the beach to check out Three Mile Lake.

We had found that the recent rains had freshened up the McNab launch to the point that we spotted three gators within the first two hundred yards and decided not to tempt fate. The Three Mile area had produced fish in the recent past and provided both a flat level spot to set up the umbrella and some chairs and a cooler breeze coming in from the gulf.

We bought some fresh dead shrimp from Buddies and soon started catching some black drum. These feisty fighters made for some enjoyable fishing throughout the afternoon and six of them made it to the insulated bag.

We caught some other small fish as is the case when fishing natural bait. It seems everything that swims loves shrimp - including this pretty little redfish.

We caught several ladyfish aka "poor man's tarpon". This one finally held still for a picture. I caught some finger mullet in the cast net and though I didn't catch anything on the live version, the ladyfish, hardheads, croaker, and drum all went for some cut pieces of fresh mullet.

You can see from this picture that this area is relatively small and lies between the surf and the bay. There are several fingers of water that make up the Three Mile area and we were fishing near a fork and a channel.

Summer is coming to a close as evidenced by this cane going to seed.

We were fishing near a wade fisherman and one kayaker who traveled down the cut to shown in the upper right of the above picture. As you can see, the wader is almost up to his armpits. He fished for hours without a strike and finally caught a nice 18" trout.

When he finally gave it up he stopped to offer his fish to us. It turned out to be "Shane from Bay City", a fellow Palacios pier fisherman who I had met and fished with over a year ago. He had two other trout on ice so our fish bag was now looking pretty good.



All in all it was a pretty enjoyable way to spend the afternoon. The area was very quiet with only the sounds of the birds and the surf in the background. We used up two pounds of shrimp and a half dozen mullet before the skeeters decided we seemed like just the right flavor. They were brutal by the time we reached the cleaning table at the Matagorda Harbor.

Tracy said that she thought that her presence at the fish cleaning table listening to the banter among guides and fishermen was comparable to me being at the yarn store listening to all the knitters twitter about yarn and such.


We were able to share some of the catch with our neighbors. Fresh fish is usually easy to transfer whether whole out of the ice chest or filleted and ready for the grill.