Fishing and Eating Our Way Along the Texas Coast

I’m on vacation for a few days. So this past Sunday I treated Janessa to a Mothers Day trip to Matagorda.

We rented a house on the Colorado River for two nights. It was a great little spot just a short drive to the beach. The house had a dock on the water. We set out my crab traps and fished most of the time. The river is so close to the jetties where we were, so there are all sorts of saltwater fish in it. Janessa wanted to catch a big redfish, and she did catch a few while we were down there, but none of them were big enough to keep. I had a couple of really big bites that broke my lines. I’d really like to know what they were.

Monday morning I woke up early and threw a line in the water. I kept catching gafftops - the slimy bluish-green catfish that a lot of fishermen throw back. But that’s all I was catching, so I decided a fish fry was in order for that evening. I filled my stringer until my arm got tired from reeling.

After cleaning the fish, we drove to the beach and enjoyed about three hours of sun, this time, in much more seclusion. I wanted to catch a shark, so I tossed out a big 18 inch mullet on a giant hook with a heavy surf weight in head-high water. The first time I checked it, something took a clean bite and ate half the mullet but missed the hook. The third time I checked it, the shark rig came flying off the leader and into the Gulf. I suppose it’s a good idea to re-tie the line after every cast when fishing in strong waves. I think the crashing waves tend to loosen knots. I don’t have another shark rig with me, so a grilled blacktip would not be on the menu that night - good thing I caught all those gafftops.

That night we fried fish and went to bed early. Janessa didn’t have to go to work until Wednesday, so we decided to fish our way back home Tuesday. We checked out that morning early and got on the road to our next fishing spot.

Some years ago I had spied this spot on a map, miles and miles down a county road on the east side of Tres Palacios Bay. It was at least 20 miles to the nearest gas station. We passed corn field after corn field until we got there. The road basically dead-ends at a locked gate, and there’s marshy water all around. I suppose it’s legal to fish off the road here. We dared not cross any fences. But it looked like people fish here. We found the remnants of a campfire and a little bit of litter. Janessa caught two undersize redfish. I landed a big blue crab that was trying to eat my piece of cut bait. But it let go and scurried back into the bay before I could grab it.

We tired of fishing and wished to eat. So we journeyed to Palacios. Only 6.5 miles away from our spot the way the gull flies, it took us 35 minutes to get there around the water.

We went to Tran’s. It advertises itself as an Asian restaurant. We came in at the end of the lunch rush. Remember, Palacios has about the same population as La Grange. Everybody sized us up when we walked in.

The food was excellent. I had a plate of cold rice noodles with hot stir fried shrimp on a bed of lettuce, accompanied by typical Vietnamese condiments - fish sauce and vinegar, crispy onions, herbs, julienned carrot, and whatever else I’ve forgotten. Janessa had the shrimp lo mein, which, she noticed, was cooked with brown butter rather than soaking in some random oil.

The place exudes Palacios vibes. Clean. Run by young people with vaguely Vietnamese faces, whom, I assume, are the next generation of the Tran family.

Catholic iconography and pictures of shrimp boats adorn the rather plain walls.

After lunch, we decided the seven crabs I caught were not enough for a proper seafood boil. We drove to the harbor where dozens of shrimp boats were docked. I picked out one of the nondescript warehouses with an open door where I saw three salty men milling about next to a boat smoking cigarettes.

“Y’all got any shrimp?” I asked.

“How much you want?” one of them replied.

I found the right spot. I bought five pounds of beautiful head-on shrimp caught that morning for $25.

We were going to find a spot to fish some more that afternoon. We drove down Bayshore Drive looking for some public access to the water, but all the shoreline appeared to be private property. It was around 2 p.m. The wind was blowing really hard and the bay looked like the inside of a washing machine. So we called it quits and headed home.

That night we cut our fingers picking apart crabs and shrimp heads. It’s a good thing I’m off work until Monday. I’m going to need some rest.