Where have the red fish gone?

Way back in 1999 when I first started my guide service at Sabine Lake, fishing was really good. There were still enough flounder to target them from spring through November. Had I chosen to do so I could have made my living off flounder alone for most of the year. The spotted sea trout fishery was ridiculously good. It was no problem to catch trout twelve months out of the year. However, when the conditions got tough in the dead of winter and the temperature of the water would fall into the middle to upper forties there was always a constant supply of red fish. They were everywhere; up both the Sabine and Neches Rivers, in the vast Louisiana marshes, Taylors Bayou, Keith Lake, mid-Sabine lake, the ship channel from the Neches River to Sabine Pass and into the Gulf of Mexico. They were almost always around and if I really needed a few extra fish in the box, it wasn’t too hard to catch a few of them. At first, they were not so popular with my guests but after a few years they really began to gain in popularity. Now, at least seventy-five percent of my guests love to catch them and at least thirty percent would rather target them exclusively. I could depend on red fish to show up every year at various locations around Sabine lake when there were schools of shrimp. If there were birds working in the lake, I knew that there would be schools of red fish out there with them and in the summer on those hot days with no wind big pods of reds would follow the large pogey schools as they would surface to feed on plankton. In December, red fish would pull out of the marsh and lay in the mud along the entire shoreline of the Louisiana side of Sabine Lake. The one constant that I could depend on was red fish. They were always available; that is until this year. As the lower tides of the winter solstice arrived in late December 2019 the expected, and always consistent arrival of large numbers of red fish along the Louisiana shoreline did not happen. I searched from Coffee Ground Cove and the mouth of the Sabine River all of the way down to Blue Buck Point on the south end of Sabine Lake. Very few red fish appeared at most of my contact points. At times we would stumble upon a few and catch five or six good sized slot reds; just enough to make me think, “Ok, I’ve got this”. “They are just late coming out and soon they will be everywhere”. However, it never really happened and finally I got the message. They are just not there.

Where are the red fish? If someone has the answer to this question, I wish they would let me in on the secret. I have caught so many red fish in Sabine lake that for a while I thought that they just followed my boat around looking for a free ride. Maybe they have shifted their travel route to another part of the waterway. Maybe they changed their habits and I just don’t know where to look. I keep telling myself that there are plenty of reds. Maybe they are up in the marshes and not where I am fishing, but way down inside I know that they are just gone. I should have known something was going on in the fall of last year when there were not that many reds working under the birds in the lake. The bird fishing wasn’t that good for trout either so I just blamed the problem on the possibility of not having enough shrimp to concentrate the trout or reds. Now I am convinced that something has caused a problem with recruitment. Something has cut the reproductive cycle of red fish in Sabine lake. I usually don’t catch a lot of undersized reds (red fish of less than sixteen inches) because I use strictly artificial bait. Small reds are not able to catch our usual jig and soft plastic lures as their mouths are small. You can catch these “rat” reds on dead shrimp and a small hook all day long but I don’t do that anymore. It would be easy for me to miss that there are no small reds where I am fishing. Red fish leave the bay systems when they are around thirty inches or larger and go into the Gulf to spawn. Most of them don’t come back but stay in the Gulf for the rest of their lives. It is my firm conviction that something has wiped out or otherwise interrupted the spawn of the red fish or more likely something has caused the red fish fry to not come in on the spring bull tides into Sabine Lake. Maybe the four years of super floods has affected the red fish even more than speckled trout. We know that this has happened to our trout population but red fish are much more tolerant of fresh water than trout so maybe we just didn’t pay attention to the reds. Our trout population has made a steady comeback since the low catches of 2018 until now we are catching more and larger trout. It seems that we have turned the corner on the trout fishery but the reds are quite scarce this year. There are still plenty of spawning class red fish in the Gulf of Mexico so if that is the problem all we need is to grow a new crop of red fish and the problem will solve itself.

Populations of fish in the bays and oceans is never static. There has always been cycles of feast and famine and I suspect that that has happened even when mankind wasn’t around to have an effect on the situation. All I can say right now is I miss those big orange and gold bullies of the bay and hope they return soon. You don’t realize how much you have until it is gone. If you are catching a lot of reds this year good for you. Maybe we could share a few?