Friday, July 25, 2008

Can You Fish in a Hurricane?

Can you fish in a hurricane? There's some lore about hurricanes stirring up the surf and putting fish in a feeding frenzy.
A visit to the Padre Island surf at Corpus Christi gave me the complete answer: No.
No, you can't fish in a hurricane. You can't cast your line into 50-mile an hour wind, you can't stand on the beach, if you could cast into the surf the water would whip your line in every direction. People did come to experience the power of a hurricane in between blinding rain squalls (and try to fly in the wind), although most beach roads, and certainly the pier, were closed.
At Packery Channel the jetties were barely visible from the highway, and the boat launch docks were nearly submerged.
In the Laguna Madre, the water was high at the piers lining the Kennedy Causeway (photo shows Clem's close to water level), and the wind made it scary to stand there since it was hard to avoid losing your balance.
I did notice these three hardy souls fishing at the closest-to-land-pier, the famous Red Dot, where they sloshed their way to the very end. And no — I asked and they had not caught any fish at all.
Maybe AFTER a hurricane, fishing will be good.

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