by John Jefferson

But, Baby, it got cold last week!

SPECKLED TROUT, shown here on the line of Jim Friebele, retired Rockport fishing guide, are one of the most popular sportfish in the Texas bays. The jury is still out on what effect last week’s storm had on trout. My only responsive source said the temperature didn’t go as low as in 2021 and didn’t last as long below freezing. Trout usually head for deeper, warmer water to survive cold weather. Let’s hope that’s the case this year. (Photo by John Jefferson)

And it carried over into this week. It got almost as cold as the one in February 2021, but it didn’t last as long. We didn’t have as much ice and snow, and the sun helped by coming out more. We recently cut down a big, dead limb on our mulberry tree and added it to our woodpile which already had a pickup full of fresh firewood in it from our January foray, so our furniture was never in danger of becoming fuel this year.

And our electricity kept working throughout the current freeze! Water was another matter. The City of Austin had assured us that they had everything under control … but they didn’t. We’re presently under a “boil water” order.

What I don’t know at this point is whether the Texas coast suffered enough to inflict more damage to an already diminished speckled trout population from last year’s fish-killing freeze.

You’ll recall that the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission took emergency action on March 24, 2021, temporarily altering spotted seatrout regulations in response to the significant fish kill that resulted from February 2021’s severe freeze. Some 3.8 million fish were killed in that extended freeze, including 61 species. Spotted sea trout, commonly known as speckled trout — or just as “specks” — were significantly hammered.

A species doesn’t recover overnight from that type of carnage. To assist in a speedy recovery, TPWD reduced the daily limit for speckled trout in the Upper and Lower Laguna Madre to three and the slot limit became 17-23 inches. Those rules expired on September 27, 2021.

Additional research by the TPWD Coastal Fisheries Division deemed it necessary to reenact the rules for the Laguna Madre (Upper and Lower) and expanded the geographic area of lowered bag limit and new slot limit. All Coastal waters from FM 457 in Sargent southward to the Rio Grande River were proposed to be included in the new emergency regulations.

At the January 2022 TPW Commission meeting, these new rules were adopted. They affect all coastal waters south of Sargent including Matagorda Bay, San Antonio Bay, Aransas Bay, Corpus Christi Bay, and the Upper and Lower Laguna Madre systems. The rules are said to become effective March 10, but there seems to be a possibility of a change in effective date. Stay tuned. These rules will expire August 31, 2023, at which time the regulations revert to the pre-February 14, 2021 rules.

The goal of this measure is to leave more spawning-age trout in the bays for two spawning seasons helping trout populations recover as quickly as possible. Personally, I hope all guides and anglers will endorse the new rules for the sake of helping Nature and TPW’s hatcheries restock what the freezing weather brutally annihilated. Everybody along the coast that I’ve talked to has verbally signed on to it.

Trout usually go to deeper water to ride out freezes. Let’s hope they did and survived the recent one.

JJ