Rockport Fishing Report – October 15th

The weekend is over and it is time for a new Rockport fishing report. This report marks the middle of our month of October. Not that it has actually felt much like October out there. But the change is upon us now. So we will recap our past week and also what we expect for the upcoming week if you plan on fly fishing in Southwest Texas. So here is your Rockport fishing report.

Since our last report a week ago, things definitely got a little more interesting out there. As you may recall, from our last report, the water was really high. Then came this week. Early in the week, our water reached the highest levels we’ve seen. We had marinas flooding, docks underwater, water over roadways in town here and everything else you could think of. It was pretty interesting. So if it wasn’t already tough enough finding shallow water, it got even tougher.

This allowed our fish even more water and areas to roam around. Not exactly making it easy to find good numbers of fish. But it wasn’t all bad either. It has been pretty fun poling the boats around over areas that are typically dry land. Lot’s of new stuff to explore, and plenty of new areas opened up with all the extra water. But again, it has really spread our fish out. So similar to our last report, it isn’t uncommon to do a little searching in between shots at fish. But they are out there.

Most days, when you do find them, they have been pretty cooperative. Again, most days. Yesterday (Sunday), they wouldn’t play nice at all for us. Everything we saw, from start to finish, was laying up. All while having a solid tide movement. We just couldn’t buy a fish that would cooperate and swim for us. We did find plenty of fish laying in the grass or under the mangroves. Even had a couple swim right up to a few different flies, just to turn and slowly swim off. Really weird, and really annoying. But that was yesterday and those sorrows have already been washed away with a couple of glasses of Garrison Brothers.

Other days prior, once we did find fish, they were pretty responsive to the fly. We had a couple refuse a few smaller flies. Maybe the fly, but most likely the fish. Most others were just fine on the usual patterns. Darker crab and toad type patterns have been first out of the box most days. Also, sticking with fairly heavy stuff too. Especially if fishing a bit deeper water that we seem to have plenty of these days. Or, we did throw some intermediate leaders, from Airflo, as well. These made it even easier to get flies down if and when we were fishing a bit deeper water.

There were a few smaller schools this week. Not every day, but still enough to offer a little encouragement. One morning, we had 5 smaller schools (3-5 fish) swimming a bank. These all came in under an hours time. That was by far the fastest action we had seen this week, with all the water and such. So again, very encouraging. Hopefully this becomes more common place in the days to come.

As we write this, our first cold front of the year has finally reached the Southwest Texas Coast. And it’s about damn time! When we pulled our boats yesterday it was 90 degrees out. Currently, it is 57 degrees at Fly Fish Rockport world headquarters, here in Rockport, Texas. The wind is blowing hard from the North, which will really help in blowing out some of this extra water. This is the storm we have been waiting on for weeks around here. We needed something to push the water out of course, but even more importantly, cool our waters off. So this will certainly do the job in the coming days. So that is the good news.

The bad news… This weather pattern is predicted to sit on us well into next week possibly. That is far from ideal. It’s one thing to have to cancel a day or two while this all blows through. Totally worth it, for the coming improvements in the fishing. But this weather is looking pretty grim, as it stands today, for getting out there at all before the weekend. So we are keeping our fingers crossed in hopes that it blows out sooner and we can continue to get everyone out on the water as scheduled. But we are going to have to wait and see what we are dealt.

So, for now, we are tying flies, catching up on computer work, editing video and digging out our warm clothes to survive the week. There will probably be a few rounds of golf in the mix as well. Anything to keep from going too stir crazy. But with all this weather in our forecast, we will try and get another Rockport fishing report posted Friday. Hopefully we can update everyone before the weekend hits.

We are hoping the weatherman provides us some good news very soon. We hate canceling trips. So we are keeping a close eye on things. You can always email any time if you would like any up to the minute Southwest Texas fly fishing or Rockport type news. We continue to post on  Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. Or perhaps SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube Channel as well. We continually are trying to add more videos and stuff there. We try to keep stuff fresh for those of you that are wishing you were on the flats with us. So be sure to follow us on all our social media stuff. And don’t forget to sign up for our monthly newsletter below.