Both barefoot, Capt. Brandon Schuler and I crept across the hard-baked South Texas spoil island. A hundred yards ahead, redfish tails waved beyond cactus blooms and grape-size succulents hanging over the water’s edge. As surfers, we share an aversion to shoes, and if you shuffle your feet and don’t backtrack through your own mud trail you can safely wade sans clunky canvas “stickfish” boots. But walking through the primo rattler habitat, I couldn’t help but think of the leather snake boats hanging next to the canvas ones in the Get-A-Way Adventures lodge.
“Here, we talk about redfish and rattlesnakes in the same breath,” Brandon said. “Just try to focus on the redfish.”
The petite crab pattern made nary a dimple, and a fish scarfed it before the fly had sunk an inch. Then the fish ran and ran in a futile search for something, anything, to hang me on. But there is zero, absolutely zero hard structure in the “Mother Lagoon.” We waded toward the tiring fish and the lush seagrass felt like a cool lawn underfoot. And what a lawn, a submerged prairie in the middle of a desert. The Lower Laguna Madre, North America’s only hyper-saline lagoon, looks remarkably like Utah’s Great Salt Lake, but with abundant wildlife.
The seagrass meadows provide protective nursery areas for larval and juvenile fish, shrimp and crabs as well as cover and feeding areas for spotted seatrout and red drum. Except for a couple of small towns, such as Port Mansfield, most of the lower Texas coast is completely undeveloped, and undisturbed. There’s enough pressure that the plentiful fish are challenging but not maddeningly difficult. In fact, after five days of fishing I was ready to nominate South Texas reds and trout for the most likely to take a topwater award.
In-line wading is the time-honored way to cover a Texas flat.
The Lower Laguna Madre has long been a dream destination for anglers and waterfowlers, but remains a wilderness frontier unlike any other in North America. Many thanks to the Shulers; our children and grandchildren will benefit from your knowledge of and sense of responsibility for the lagoon.
If You Go
Flights connect through Houston to Brownsville, or easier, through Harlingen.
