Fishing Frenzy

Picture yourself as a mature speckled trout basking in the shallows of a barren East Matagorda Bay mud flat. At last, beams of light penetrate wintry clouds and are warming an insulating mud bottom, energizing your lethargic attitude.

All ten pounds of you cruises along the temperate flat soon reaching your familiar feeding ground-a distinct patch of boggy mud and elevated oyster shell. Approaching it sparks memories from seasons ago. Pastimes of gorging yourself with jumbo sized shrimp and feasting over endless schools of finger mullet come to mind and fuel your hunger.

You get into your favorite spot, right where the shell bed meets the mud and wait. Before long, a tempting six inch mullet comes along, oblivious to your presence.

Immediately, you propel at full speed and attack; exploding the waters surface. The six-inch mullet is devoured instantly and lays to rest in the yellow interior of your mouth. You slowly sink back to the warmth of the mud bottom.

Only a moment later you see another one; this one looks like it's wounded. An easy catch, you chuckle to yourself as you prepare to pounce.

Without hesitation, you spring at the mullet, quickly catching it in your jaws - that was easy, you think; at least until it starts fighting back!

A forceful shake dislodges your prey, but somehow you're still being pulled upwards and you become too tired to fight back against the pull of that Boga caught in your lip.

"10 pounds!" is yelled by a man bundled up beneath layers of outerwear.

Two other men surround your beastly exterior. Cameras flash.

Then it's over as quickly as it began and you're back in the water, free but utterly exhausted.

"Courtesy of a Corky Fatboy!" is faintly heard as you dash back to the warming protection of your feeding ground.

If this is how a trophy trout really understood us when we talked, they'd know that in being tricked by the lure, they were making an angler's dream a reality.

When word broke out that James Wallace broke the state's speckled trout record, an infection had spread across the gulf coast; fishermen turned to an arsenal of Corky's, a slow sinking soft bait, when hunting for the trout of their lifetime. Packing the size of a topwater and the wobble of a broken-back, the tempting attraction of a slow retrieved Corky in winter is just flat out effective for trophy specks.

"It got crazy when Wallace caught that fish," states B&L Corky founder, Paul Brown. "Anglers poured into our shop and literally bought every single Corky off the shelf." Even after so many years, this Corky craze hasn't slowed in the Brown family's Houston-based shop.

Port Mansfield fishing guide, Captain Mike McBride definitely knows a thing or two about Corky's and uses a unique retrieve to fool lower coast specks.

"Corkys are worked differently across the coast, but I try to pop the knot off, when I'm working Corky's while trying to keep up with the slack." Contrary to the popular belief of working Corky's "slower than slow", McBride works his soft baits aggressively. "The whole attraction of working an original Corky is unpredictable movements with the irresistible pause," states McBride.

Matagorda trophy trout guide Captain Jesse Arsola tells us that he has a specific technique for working Corkys saltwater fishing lures.

"When you're dealing with trout who are in an aggressive mood they'll bite just about anything. However, those times when you have to work at it to get them interested, that is when your technique really matters."

"If I use a Corky, I'm usually using a counting system. I keep track of how long it takes the lure to hit bottom, then I vary the amount of time I allow my Corky to sink before I pull out the slack. From there, it's just a matter of identifying what count you tend to get bites on. This is a really easy way to figure out just where in the water column the trout are feeding."

Captain John Havens, a tournament angler from Clear Lake, Texas favors chartreuse, white, and gold sided Corky Devil and a rather routine retrieve.

"All you have to do is to make sure you keep in constant contact with the lure so you can tell when you have even the littlest nibble," Havens says. He lifts the rod and gives it one or two twitches before letting his lure fall, the only variation this expert angler uses in his retrieve.