One memorable
afternoon, I stepped onto the Galveston
seawall at a favorite spot and looked at gorgeously green water alive with active, “skittish” bait — and more Sargassum weed than I’d ever seen.
weed) off our lures.” When the mats are tightly packed
along well-defined rip lines, it’s easy (and quite productive) to troll the edges and pick off big predators. This past summer, however, more days than not, the stuff seemed to be almost everywhere. It showed up in clumps as small as your fist and as large as a shopping mall — and you couldn’t avoid them. Along the beachfront, the incessantly
present seaweed is equally annoying for anglers on jetties, on piers or standing waist-deep on the second bar. Count me among them. On numerous occasions this past
summer, potentially good shots at speckled trout and Spanish mackerel turned into weed-plucking wastes of time. One memorable afternoon, I stepped onto the Galveston seawall at a favorite spot and looked at gorgeously green water alive with active, “skit- tish” bait — and more Sargassum weed than I’d ever seen. For 30 minutes, I tried to find a lure
that would make the trip out and back without fouling in the hay. If there is such a lure, I didn’t have it that day.
MORE THAN ONE WAY Fishing around inshore mats of sea-
weed is difficult and interminably frus- trating, but not impossible. Lure- chunking purists must set aside their treble-hooked plugs and throw only single-hooked offerings. Learn to make your lures weedless, too, either by affixing some sort of deflector — with
JASON TALLEY TIDE
www.joincca.org Doug Pike has fished all over North
America and Central America, and as far away as Sweden. He was an outdoors columnist at the Houston Chronicle for 20 years and has also worked as editor of TIDE, a contributing editor for Field & Stream, and host of Inside the Outdoors (ESPN 790 am). He has won more than 100 state and national awards for writing, photography, editing and broadcast.
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soft plastics, start with an inch or so of 60-pound test mono and a dab of instant glue; you’ll figure it out — or buying already weedless lures, proba- bly hanging on the bass-fishing aisle of your local tackle store. A better method is to hang a shrimp,
live or imitation, a few feet beneath a popping cork. Sling that rig into a hole in the grass, and “pop” that cork vigor- ously. A fighting fish might drag your gear into the slop, but that’s better at least than having to remove weeds time after time from empty hooks.
TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING “Ecologically, alive and in modera-
tion, it’s a good thing,” Stunz said of Sargassum weed. “It provides habitat for fish, foraging for birds and bigger fish, dune stabilization. But nobody really knows what to do when so much of it washes onto the beach.” Its value at sea is such that federal
managers are watchful of the weed, especially since commercial enterprises showed interest and began to harvest this floating crop for conversion into everything from fertilizer to herbal tea. “Huge ships were scooping it up
and processing it,” Stunz said. “There was concern they actually could do some long-term damage. Plans are in place to make sure the habitat is there to support the animals that depend on (Sargassum weed).” In the end, however, scientists remain
nearly as puzzled as fishermen and beachcombers as to how much Sargas - sum we’ll see in future summers and how the seasonal visitor can or should be managed. “It’s one of the most basic life forms
on the planet,” Stunz said. Maybe so, but that doesn’t make it
smell any better on the beach or get it out of my way when I’m trying to sling a big topwater at a fat trout.
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