Let Me Take You to the Beach

The excellent outdoors guys at the Chronicle tipped me last weekend that the surf was flat and that blue-green water reached almost to the beach. Motivated me to get up before dawn and drive to East Beach. It was pretty, and as I reached the first sandbar I saw a pair of dolphins porpoising with the current just yards in front of me. And that wasn’t the end of the fish, rafts of mullet floated by, diverging, converging, and occasionally exploding as creatures up the food chain slashed at them. A few mean strikes at my finger mullets, but only one hook-up, a twenty inch speckled trout who swallowed a kalhe hook, which is rare, and thus was dressed and iced. Later saw a pod of dolphins head back towards the jetty. Sure enjoy seeing the little ones.

What to do after a day like that but get up and go back. Stopped for a pint of shrimp and waded into the same spot. The water had sanded-up but visibility was still two feet plus, good for Galveston. Caught little gafftops, sand trout and croakers. Released a frisky speck, bigger than yesterdays. It jumped when I set the white bass assassin. The biggest fish pulled and ran, then ran towards the beach, where I saw the dorsal fin as it passed. I brought in, and saw that it was a twenty- some inch hammerhead. As I brought it close to cut it loose, I appreciated that I had it on the end of a 7-1/2 foot rod and not a 5-1/2 footer. The little freak wasn’t but two feet long but its eyes were six inches apart.That encounter made the neck-deep tiptoe trip back from the second sandbar memorable.