Passport to Texas

Image from June issue Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine

TPW TV: Coastal Fishing Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download

Summer officially arrives later this month. And if fishing is on your to-do list, Texas Parks and Wildlife TV Series Producer Don Cash says, a segment on this week’s show highlights angling opportunities along the Texas coast.

58 –I’m pretty sure that the fishing along the Texas coast is pretty good all year round, but summertime is when people seem to really think about going fishing. And this story focuses on a couple of different ways to do it. One of those ways is to take a charter boat out. The great thing about that is you’re surrounded by water — no land anywhere in sight – and you don’t really know what you’re going to catch sometimes. You never know what’s going to come up on the end of your hook; you can specifically fish for a certain type of fish, but Lord, there might be a hundred pound grouper, when you’re fishing for that two pound snapper. So, there’s a lot of excitement there. One thing you see in this story is the people fishing are having a really good time. Whoa! That’s a red snapper [laughs]. What I hope happens with this story is people will watch it and they’ll say ‘Wow. That looks like fun.’ If you can’t do a charter boat, you can always do wade fishing; you can go fish on the pier. There are all kinds of ways to go fishing on the coast, and all of them are a lot of fun.

Thanks, Don.

Support provided by Ram Trucks. Doing what’s right and good regardless of the degree of difficulty — takes guts. Those are the people who build Ram trucks. RAM.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

Free Fishing in State Parks

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June 3rd through 9th is National Fishing and Boating week. The Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation — or RBFF –promotes this week as a way to increase participation in recreational angling and boating.

The non-profit hopes that by improving public awareness citizens will protect, conserve, and restore this nation’s aquatic natural resources. Research indicates people who engage the out of doors safeguard it.

One way RBFF does this is by promoting Free Fishing Day on the first Saturday of June. Most states allow people with or without a license to fish for free in their state’s waters on that one day. In Texas, we fish free every day when casting a line in a water body inside a Texas state park.

That’s why we didn’t make a fuss about Free Fishing Day this year. The ability to fish free 365 days a year in state parks, without needing a fishing license, is yet another benefit of living in Texas. Having said that, you must follow size and bag limits, and when it’s trout stocking time, you will need a trout stamp to reel in the rainbows.

Some parks even offer tackle loaner programs, so if you don’t have gear, no problem.

Whether you catch and release, or bring fish home for dinner, make plans to go to an inland or coastal state park and cast a line during National Fishing and Boating week or any week…because you fish free in state parks.

That’s our show…we receive support from the Sport Fish Restoration Program…working to increase boating and fishing opportunities in Texas.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

Red Drum

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After years of monitoring, data collection and analysis, the TPW Commission upheld a Legislative directive, and in 1981 banned commercial fishing of red drum/redfish in Texas waters; something known today as The Redfish Wars.

15- You think of the term ‘wars.’ This was really a conflict between what we were finding in our bays regarding the red drum populations, and what the commercial fishermen traditionally did. It was their livelihood.

Paul Hammerschmidt, with coastal fisheries, says commercial fishermen criticized the agency’s method of random sampling, saying it set nets where redfish were sparse.

19-If we sampled in areas where there always were found fish, it would take us a longer time to detect a change – either positive or negative — when you’re always able to catch fish. When you do it randomly around a bay system, you have a much better way of detecting a change.

Although Texas Parks and Wildlife was sued over redfish regulations, the strength of the science won the case. In the thirty years since the ban, redfish populations have rebounded, and are more robust than ever. The ban, stocking programs, size and bag limits placed on sport anglers, have helped. Since then, the relationship with commercial anglers has also improved.

04- We do have a much better relationship than during the wartime.

The Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration project supports our series…and funds the operations and management of fish hatcheries in Texas. For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

Red Drum

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It’s illegal to commercially fish red drum, or redfish, in Texas. In the 1970s, during routine monitoring of bays, biologists discovered a serious decline in the number of the species caught by commercial fishermen.

06- So, we started looking into it very carefully, and started implementing bag and size limits on these animals.

Paul Hammerschmidt, with coastal fisheries, says the new restrictions were just the beginning of a lengthy and involved process to help increase populations of the species.

12-The legislature actually required us to establish quotas on commercial fishing. And we were allowed to modify those quotas depending on the amount of fish that were being caught on a day-by-day basis.

Most commercial anglers cooperated with Texas Parks and Wildlife by reporting the redfish caught in their nets….

26-Annecdotally, we had heard that red drum being landed and sold to fish wholesalers were actually reported as another species. What that did, is that showed fewer and fewer redfish were being caught in a particular bay. And that impacted the formula that we used to establish the quotas. So, the fewer and fewer fish that they got, the next year the fewer and fewer fish they were allowed to catch.

This marked the beginning of what would become known as The Redfish Wars; we’ll have more tomorrow.

The Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration project supports our series…and funds the operations and management of fish hatcheries in Texas. For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

Bolivar Peninsula after Ike 2008, Image from http://www.srh.noaa.gov

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Texas lost 8-thousand acres of submerged oyster habitat when Hurricane Ike blew into the gulf in 2008. Some reefs will restore naturally; other will receive some help.

24- We are trying to accelerate that that recovery effort by putting some the materials down to allow new oysters to settle on. We also worked closely with the commercial industry and got them involved in pulling their dredges up with bags off of them across some of these reefs that were marginally covered up, and to pull the shell back to the surface to provide that substrate for young oysters to attach to and start growing.

Lance Robinson from coastal fisheries wrote the story. Ike pushed saltwater and debris 15-20 miles inland, which decimated saltmarsh habitat – habitat that’s a marine nursery for sport and commercial species. Restoration work is ongoing.

12—And it took several weeks just for heavy equipment to get into the marshes to remove the mountains of debris before we could get in and assess what the other impacts were. And at that point it was just gut-wrenching.

As bad as the damage after Ike, Robinsons says it could have been worse.

13—…both from a human impact and a natural resource impact had the storm tracked a little bit farther to the north. It would have brought the eye farther into the bay, and we would have seen a much more devastating impact.

Lance Robinson’s story about the “Hidden Damage of Ike” appears in the June issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine.

The Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration project supports our series.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.