Team Notorious is getting warmed up!

Well, although I have had 4 kayak tournaments so far this year and Thomas has had a couple of boat tournaments, we haven’t had much time to fish locally in our home waters. Thomas has been working for something like 19 days straight on a turn-around but we got a chance to hit the water together yesterday evening for a couple of hours. I’d had the boat out all morning so all my gear was still on the boat. I threw Thomas’ stuff on board before he got home from work and we hit the water shortly after he arrived.
We were all set to do some evening wade fishing but on our way across the bay we came across a HUGE flock of birds working. Pelicans and gulls together covering probably a 200 yard stretch. Irresistible! We had to stop and see what was under them. It was howling wind and pretty darn rough out there in the middle of west Galveston bay. It was so rough that there was no way to keep the boat from smacking around and making noise. We were happy to have the Midcoast corks so that we could cast those long bombs and get it a long way out there! Thomas likes the Evolution and I had on a Mojo although I ended up switching to an Inticer for better noise. The water was high but going out. Water temps right now are 78 to 80 degrees. We were fishing in 4 to 6 feet of water and there was so much bait that you could see it on the depth finder as a big band halfway down. From what we could see, it was a good mixture of glass minnows, shrimp and shad all together. Most cool!
Well after a quick “test drift” through the birds, we abandoned the wade fishing plan and stuck with drifting. It was looking to be pretty productive. We both had shrimp imitators under our corks and that’s all that they wanted. I tried a few other lures but kept going back to the DOA shrimp. We were picking up a few dink trout, many more larger trout, even a couple of surprise redfish and of course gafftops. The birds and bait pretty much stuck to the same area the whole time we were out there although they divided up in to several smaller flocks rather than the original huge one. We were the only boat.
We made 6 or 7 drifts in 2 ½ hours and ended up with 12 decent trout, the biggest going to about 5 lbs. We also had two slot reds with the biggest being a 7 pounder. We came in with just barely enough light to navigate the railroad bridge by our house. The pictures were taken after dark and all the “people” shots didn’t turn out.
Thomas will be guiding starting this fall and he is dying to have days like this for his customers!! Our wedding anniversary is today (the 16th) and we are planning to hit it again this evening. I cant think of a better anniversary date.

Thomas & Kaylin Barlow aka Team Notorious