I made my first trip to Port O'Connor, Texas, with fishing buddy, Alan, who had not been to that location in about 15 years. We decided to make the trip to POC since Galveston is still recovering from Hurricane Ike.
We arrived mid-morning on Saturday and checked into The Inn at Clark's. It's a motel right on the Intracoastal complete with boat slips, ramp, bait shop, restaurant and nice rooms. We headed out as quick as we could and found the air temperature around 85 with clear skies but very windy. Even with the wind not in our favor, we decided to check out the big jetties (Matagorda Ship Channel) and brave the five-plus feet waves coming in through the channel. That was a little bit of a scary ride! We fished near the rocks and landed several sharks but no bull reds which was our target species. We finished the afternoon in the Intracoastal and caught sand trout, croaker, lady fish, and several other small bait fish that would be used the next day.
On Sunday, we hit the water early and fished the backside of Matagorda Peninsula near Bird Island. We were in 30 feet of 79 degree water. The day started out cloudy and overcast but the sun came out later in the afternoon. We still had 15-20 mph winds to contend with all day. We landed five bull reds, ranging from 18-22 pounds, and several huge gafftops using cut croaker and lady fish steaks as bait.
On Monday, we were out early again using live shrimp, a few piggy perch and an artificial swim bait at the POC jetties, and landed several gafftops, croakers, whiting, a Spanish mackerel, and some other small fish. We were off the water early and headed home.
It was a good first trip considering the wind and gave me the opportunity to check out the POC fishing. I'll definitely make future trips to POC but I'm also looking forwarding to returning to Galveston as soon as possible.
