A "SPECIAL" KIND OF GUY:

By Captain Allen Sifford

A guy I know wanted to catch that "fish of a lifetime". He had also heard a lot about Baffin Bay and it's monster trout. It was early spring, when he decided to set everything aside hop on a plane and head my way for a three day adventure in search of that monster trout, the one he always dreamed about.

The first day we got a very late start. The plane arrived in Corpus Christi at 10.30 am and by the time we got to the house and unloaded his suit cases and fishing gear it was high noon.

We decided to start at the mouth of Baffin Bay and work back north to JFK Causeway. The first four places we stopped we didn't even get a bite so we went to one of my sweet spots, just about in my back yard. We started throwing cocahoe's and started catching trout. The only thing was, they were fifteen to the eighteen inches in size. We decided to call it a day and get ready for the next day.

Next day we got a very early start and decided to run deep into Baffin Bay. At the very first spot we stopped WHAM, FISH ON!, a nice eighteen inch trout on the first cast and a few more and then something "big" hit the line started running. We were into a nice school of twenty-six and twenty-eight inch reds. For a minute there I thought I might have put him on his trophy, but not this time. We were after big specks, so we left that spot and went searching some other places and caught and released a few more trout. By now the sun was up high. I decided to go back to the first spot we had fished that morning. As we drift we caught a few fish here and there. All the sudden the cork went under and the fish started running. There it is! As she exploded out of the water, a big trout I estimated at thirty inches. He fought her for ten minutes before he finally decided to get in the water with her. After several more minutes, there she came belly-up. He hand landed her and was admiring her size, knowing he would release her. She was a big trout but not a wall hanger trout. The speck was very dull with cuts where the birds had been dive bombing her so he let the biggest trout he ever caught go and watched it swim away.

The third day we decided to go back in to Baffin Bay to make a quick trip before the six o’clock flight back to Houston. When we got to Baffin there was a lot of boat traffic so we fished a few spots then decided to start working our way back to C & W Marina. We drifted a couple areas and then decided to drift a nice looking island where we could see some sand pockets on the bottom. I was first to hook-up, a nice trout. All of a sudden again all hell broke loose, like an over size torpedo flying though the water and the line on his reel just took off screaming. This was it, a big trout. I mean big, just as big, if not bigger than the one the day before. She came out of the water peeling off more line, with her over-drive kicked in. Finally, it turned and started coming in, unwillingly, to the boat. With the big speck belly up and seemingly out of energy, he reached over to hand land it, when with a last burst, it made a final little run and was landed by hand. There it was, the trout he was after, thirty and a half inches.

Now we had to hurry. We wrapped the trout in a wet T-shirt and started making time back to the dock. There was a taxidermist to see, John Glenn, and a plane to catch.

The special kind of guy that went with me those three days was my dad and it was his first time ever to fish Baffin Bay with me and I’m sure it will not be his last.

Back | Up