From "The Speckled Truth"
And other fish stories as well. Incredible stuff..
I ran across this and it piqued my interest. I love this type of stuff! People wonder why they don't see reports like this now...
"Ecological Survey of the Upper Laguna Madre, 1957"
Here are pictures of a 37'' trout that was caught in 1937 by a guy in Corpus Christi.. the weight is not known. His son sent the mount to a taxidermist to be redone. It's a hell of a fish... Also here is an interesting article about the UpperLagunaMadre. This was actually printed in the Houston Paper in 1999. it speaks of the executive director of the texas outdoors whose job was working with TPWD imformation Branch. the picture will follow as soon as i get it. it was printed by Shannon Tompkins 12-13-1999 in the sports section on page 13.
So it was earlier this week as I picked through a box of what kindly could be called "junk" collected by my friend and hopeless pack rat, Paul Hope. Paul passed away a little more than a year ago, leaving a hole in the heart of everyone who knew him and a storage shed filled with items reflecting some of his greatest loves - the printed word, mesquite and the detritus of his 30-plus years as mostly unpaid executive director of the Texas Outdoor Writers Association.
Paul's real job was in the information branch of the TexasParks and Wildlife department, having gone to work for TPWD's precursor, the Texas Game and Fish Commission, in the late 1940s. So much of the storage shed's collection was somehow related to the agency. Those of us who knew him were encouraged to take whatever we found of interest. In the box I collected, among the pieces of hand-worked mesquite and the old TPWD magazines and other agency trivia were a bunch of yellowing scientific reports. This week, I got around to picking through them.
There was a 1958 report on the Texas shrimp fishery, complete with photos, illustrations and explanations of what then were the relatively new otter trawls. There was a 1962 digest of Texas hunting and fishing laws. Anyone who thinks regulations are complicated today needs to try wading through that sea of confusion. But perhaps the most fascinating piece was a 50-page report titled "An Ecological Survey of the UpperLagunaMadre", published in 1957. The thing was hypnotizing.
The UpperLagunaMadre is today considered the state's premier fishery for large speckled trout. The two most recent state-record trout, a 13.5-pounder caught in the 1970s and the current record, a 13.69-pounder caught in 1996, were taken in Baffin Bay, a lobe of the UpperLagunaMadre.
But those fish can't match what anglers and biologists saw there in the 1950s. More on that in a minute. The report gave a brief history of the UpperLagunaMadre, then considered the Texas bay least affected by man, isolated as it was by huge ranches on the mainland and the uninhabited wilderness of Padre Island on the Gulf side. It long remained a seldom-visited spot because of the distances involved. The west side of Baffin Bay was more than 20 miles from the closest access point. And until after World War II, when nominally reliable outboards became available, few anglers were willing to risk traveling that distance into such an isolated and wild place.
The document also indicated the Upper and Lower LagunaMadre had been one continuous bay until a 1919 hurricane shoved a portion of Padre Island into the bay, effectively dividing it into two parts - Upper and Lower Laguna. I'd never heard that. The bays remained separated until 1948, when the last link of the Intracoastal Waterway was completed. That barge canal, 125 feet wide and 12 feet deep, cut through the sand flats and dunes left by the 1919 hurricane, creating what Laguna anglers have ever since called "The Landcut."
There was more intriguing information. The UpperLaguna had suffered bouts of "red water" or "bad water" from time to time prior to the 1950s. So the "brown tide" that has been hassling the UpperLaguna for most of this decade is nothing new, although most think it is. But it was the information about the Upper Laguna's fisheries that was most
spellbinding.
In 1956, the report said, the UpperLaguna produced a full 60 percent of all the bay fish taken from Texas waters, commercial and recreational. And often they were both. Recreational anglers were commercial anglers in disguise. The report estimated 38 percent of the total commercial catch of redfish and speckled trout taken from the UpperLaguna in 1953 was made by "sport" anglers who sold their catch.
Despite the growing fishing pressure and the drastic changes in hydrology caused by the Intracoastal and the building of a landfill causeway connecting Padre Island with the mainland, the bay remained an incredibly rich and diverse ecosystem. The nets and trawls and other sampling devices used by the biologists showed fisheries that disappeared soon after.
They caught sawfish - two huge ones weighing more than 100 pounds. Sawfish have been gone from all Texas bays for more than 30 years. There were heaps of tripletail in the Landcut. There were hordes of pompano everywhere in the bay each autumn. Neither are there now. There were tarpon and pipefish and other species now seldom seen in the Laguna. But what jumps out is the speckled trout. The huge speckled trout!
"Trout to 8 and 9 pounds are abundant, and individuals to 12 pounds are not rare," the researchers reported. They backed that up with the yields from their gill nets. One net set along the Kenedy County shoreline near the Landcut in 1954 produced three speckled trout weighing 15 pounds or more!
There were several other trout taken by researchers that topped anything on record today. But the most monstrous - the most absolutely incredible speckled trout - was one they picked up in the wake of a killer freeze in 1951. That trout, found floating near Point of Rocks at the mouth of Baffin Bay, measured an unimaginable 48 inches and weighed an estimated 25 pounds! That's almost 15 inches longer and more than 11 pounds heavier than the current state-record speck.
The last photo is the skull of a speckled trout that Mike McBride found in the Lower Laguna Madre and the other two are from a 26 and 28" trout...wow!
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
And other fish stories as well. Incredible stuff..
I ran across this and it piqued my interest. I love this type of stuff! People wonder why they don't see reports like this now...
"Ecological Survey of the Upper Laguna Madre, 1957"
Here are pictures of a 37'' trout that was caught in 1937 by a guy in Corpus Christi.. the weight is not known. His son sent the mount to a taxidermist to be redone. It's a hell of a fish... Also here is an interesting article about the UpperLagunaMadre. This was actually printed in the Houston Paper in 1999. it speaks of the executive director of the texas outdoors whose job was working with TPWD imformation Branch. the picture will follow as soon as i get it. it was printed by Shannon Tompkins 12-13-1999 in the sports section on page 13.
So it was earlier this week as I picked through a box of what kindly could be called "junk" collected by my friend and hopeless pack rat, Paul Hope. Paul passed away a little more than a year ago, leaving a hole in the heart of everyone who knew him and a storage shed filled with items reflecting some of his greatest loves - the printed word, mesquite and the detritus of his 30-plus years as mostly unpaid executive director of the Texas Outdoor Writers Association.
Paul's real job was in the information branch of the TexasParks and Wildlife department, having gone to work for TPWD's precursor, the Texas Game and Fish Commission, in the late 1940s. So much of the storage shed's collection was somehow related to the agency. Those of us who knew him were encouraged to take whatever we found of interest. In the box I collected, among the pieces of hand-worked mesquite and the old TPWD magazines and other agency trivia were a bunch of yellowing scientific reports. This week, I got around to picking through them.
There was a 1958 report on the Texas shrimp fishery, complete with photos, illustrations and explanations of what then were the relatively new otter trawls. There was a 1962 digest of Texas hunting and fishing laws. Anyone who thinks regulations are complicated today needs to try wading through that sea of confusion. But perhaps the most fascinating piece was a 50-page report titled "An Ecological Survey of the UpperLagunaMadre", published in 1957. The thing was hypnotizing.
The UpperLagunaMadre is today considered the state's premier fishery for large speckled trout. The two most recent state-record trout, a 13.5-pounder caught in the 1970s and the current record, a 13.69-pounder caught in 1996, were taken in Baffin Bay, a lobe of the UpperLagunaMadre.
But those fish can't match what anglers and biologists saw there in the 1950s. More on that in a minute. The report gave a brief history of the UpperLagunaMadre, then considered the Texas bay least affected by man, isolated as it was by huge ranches on the mainland and the uninhabited wilderness of Padre Island on the Gulf side. It long remained a seldom-visited spot because of the distances involved. The west side of Baffin Bay was more than 20 miles from the closest access point. And until after World War II, when nominally reliable outboards became available, few anglers were willing to risk traveling that distance into such an isolated and wild place.
The document also indicated the Upper and Lower LagunaMadre had been one continuous bay until a 1919 hurricane shoved a portion of Padre Island into the bay, effectively dividing it into two parts - Upper and Lower Laguna. I'd never heard that. The bays remained separated until 1948, when the last link of the Intracoastal Waterway was completed. That barge canal, 125 feet wide and 12 feet deep, cut through the sand flats and dunes left by the 1919 hurricane, creating what Laguna anglers have ever since called "The Landcut."
There was more intriguing information. The UpperLaguna had suffered bouts of "red water" or "bad water" from time to time prior to the 1950s. So the "brown tide" that has been hassling the UpperLaguna for most of this decade is nothing new, although most think it is. But it was the information about the Upper Laguna's fisheries that was most
spellbinding.
In 1956, the report said, the UpperLaguna produced a full 60 percent of all the bay fish taken from Texas waters, commercial and recreational. And often they were both. Recreational anglers were commercial anglers in disguise. The report estimated 38 percent of the total commercial catch of redfish and speckled trout taken from the UpperLaguna in 1953 was made by "sport" anglers who sold their catch.
Despite the growing fishing pressure and the drastic changes in hydrology caused by the Intracoastal and the building of a landfill causeway connecting Padre Island with the mainland, the bay remained an incredibly rich and diverse ecosystem. The nets and trawls and other sampling devices used by the biologists showed fisheries that disappeared soon after.
They caught sawfish - two huge ones weighing more than 100 pounds. Sawfish have been gone from all Texas bays for more than 30 years. There were heaps of tripletail in the Landcut. There were hordes of pompano everywhere in the bay each autumn. Neither are there now. There were tarpon and pipefish and other species now seldom seen in the Laguna. But what jumps out is the speckled trout. The huge speckled trout!
"Trout to 8 and 9 pounds are abundant, and individuals to 12 pounds are not rare," the researchers reported. They backed that up with the yields from their gill nets. One net set along the Kenedy County shoreline near the Landcut in 1954 produced three speckled trout weighing 15 pounds or more!
There were several other trout taken by researchers that topped anything on record today. But the most monstrous - the most absolutely incredible speckled trout - was one they picked up in the wake of a killer freeze in 1951. That trout, found floating near Point of Rocks at the mouth of Baffin Bay, measured an unimaginable 48 inches and weighed an estimated 25 pounds! That's almost 15 inches longer and more than 11 pounds heavier than the current state-record speck.
The last photo is the skull of a speckled trout that Mike McBride found in the Lower Laguna Madre and the other two are from a 26 and 28" trout...wow!
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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