Martin said winter trout are often lethargic and not willing to chase baitfish around as they do in the summer. The ticket to a winter trout is to offer a big, protein-rich meal. Best bet is to drag a big soft-plastic bait over the shell and mud, creating a mud cloud that simulates a shrimp or eel bursting out of the mud.
“It seems that winter trout suspend in the middle of the water column over this dark bottom. By stirring up the mud with the soft-plastic bait, you can entice those trout to take a look,” said Martin. Popular soft plastics for this tactic include Bass Assassins, Norton Sand Eels, Trout Killers and others.
West Galveston Bay is only a cast away from Capt. James Plaag’s Tiki Island home. It has plenty of muddy, winter trophy trout haunts. Plaag said catching a big fish in frigid water less than 50 degrees is a bit of an anomaly; he prefers temps in the upper 50s. The key to scoring, according to Plaag, is mullet schools and again, a little bit of mud and shell.
“We all know that water warms faster over mud bottom, and baitfish are there for that very reason. The prime water temp for catching big trout is 50 to 62 degrees. I am always looking for mullet in the winter, but trout will also eat the mussels out of the mud,” said Plaag.
Though that may sound weird, an inspection of the stomach contents of winter trout caught over mud often comes up with clams and mussels. As the water cools down into the 50s, baitfish generally become scarce, and since few shrimp inhabit Texas bay waters in the winter, trout turn to mussels in a pinch. That’s something many trout anglers don’t know about trout—they will root in the bottom like redfish if that’s what it takes to feed. So, don’t get too impatient to crawl a bait through the mud.
Plaag tells anglers not to expect the trout bite to be fast and furious in the winter. On a normal winter day, he gets about five bites and his parties average 10 to a dozen fish. Nonetheless, his customers know fishing the mud is about quality over quantity.
Spring’s a Toss Up
Who among us does not pine for a spectacular, sunny spring day after a cold winter? Problem is, spring may come in dribs and drabs, with winter hanging on by its fingernails. You might get a week of sunlight and air temps warm enough to send trout galloping back to the sand and grass flats, only to have a late-season cold front severe enough to send water temperatures back in the 50s and trout retreating to their mud-bottom winter haunts.
Last spring, under cloudy, rainy skies, Capt. Lynn Smith and I made a mile-long wade on a grassy, Ayres Bay shoreline. There was a warmup that week sending the water temps into the mid 60s, and mullet were returning to the area, so our hopes were that trout would come to a topwater. This particular locale has humps, guts (that’s depressions for you non-Texans), ridges and grass. Trout country at its finest. We caught plenty of trout that day on plugs and soft plastics. A trip to that very spot the previous week was pretty slow, a few trout on slow-bumped plastics was all we could muster. We figured that most of the trout had headed for deeper mud bottom.
