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| 22 November 2009
Texas snook must fall within a tight slot in order to come home for dinner. Photo: Erich Schlegel
Night Time Right Time for South Texas Snook
and the South Texas snook fishery is growing!
Florida snook anglers have known for years what some Texas fishermen have discovered in the past decade: if you want to hang a big linesider, work the night shift.
Rick Roberts, executive director of the Florida-based Snook Foundation, says structure like pilings and bridges are among the wily robalo’s favorite haunts, and now is the time to go.
“This time of the year -- now that the summer is over and the spawn is slowing down -- there are a lot of people who are fishing at night for snook,” Roberts
“This time of the year -- now that the summer is over and the spawn is slowing down -- there are a lot of people who are fishing at night for snook,” Roberts says. “Bridges are just exceptionally good to fish, and they’re exceptionally good at night. Some of the biggest fish – I’m talking big, 40-inchers -- are caught at night around the bridges.”
Rod Bates has been fishing the Lower Laguna Madre since the 1960s and says that, these days, his biggest problem when snook fishing is catching a fish in the state’s 24-inch to 28-inch slot. Because he has a day job, much of his fishing is done after the sun goes down.
“My second-smallest fish this year was 33 inches. My largest was 41-and-a-half,” Bates says. “The problem up in the pilings is not catching snook, it’s catching one you can keep.”
In Texas, night-time snook structure looks a lot like the Queen Isabella Memorial Bridge, the 2.37-mile-long causeway connecting South Padre Island to Port Isabel. The old causeway (now a fishing pier just south of the new span) and docks, rocks and points in the area also hold snook at night.
“At night, the snook are feeding very strongly,” Bates says. “I find it best on the ebb tide, by the way. Just when it starts moving again, on the slower tide, those big snook are up there feeding.”
Deep water and big structure: Insomnia's best friend in Texas. Photo: Erich Schlegel
Bates says that when he uses natural bait, he typically tries to match the hatch: he nets whatever is swimming in the area he’s fishing and pins it on a hook. More often than not, it’s ballyhoo.
“They like it alive. If that ballyhoo quits twitching, change it,” he says. “The other thing I’m using a lot is the X-Rap by Rapala. At night, I’m using the black with silver sides.”
Bates has spent hours watching snook feed at the edges of lights.
Matching the hatch is an important piece to the snook puzzle. Photo: Erich Schlegel
“There have been a few times the water was crystal-clear and I’ve been able to observe them,” he says. “The snook will patrol open water, but they’ll lay right along the structure. They seem to go back and forth within these areas. When a school of bait comes by, they just work that area until the bait is gone.”
Roberts, whose organization helps fund snook research in Florida, said the species’ eyes sport a special coating that gives them great low-light vision.
“They see very well at night compared to a lot of fish. They’re particularly good at picking off bait that’s moving along pretty quickly in the tide,” he says. “Night time is the right time for snook. They are definitely night-time party animals.”
originally published in Lone Star Outdoor News.
