I spent a few days last week in Port O’Connor, Texas fishing with a buddy, Captain Scott Null, on board his new East Cape Fury. We fished the flats one day and deep water the next day looking for big fish.
The first day started slow. When we woke the that morning we had a good northerly breeze blowing. We caught a few scattered fish and saw one group of tails that spooked as soon as my lure was in their vicinity. Scott poled a bunch of dead water that he said was teeming with life the days before. After a couple of moves we found an area that was holding fish. The fish were holding near the shorelines of small islands. Mostly singles and small fish but there were a few bigger fish mixed in. We saw much of the same after several moves. Most of the fish were scattered. We never found any big concentrations after several moves. We did find a big school of Jacks blowing up on mullet on the edge of a flat, but we never got within casting range of the school because they were moving so fast.
We awoke to prestine conditions on day two. Scott let me make the call to chase big fish or hit the flats again for redfish. I wanted to fish deep for big fish for a change of pace. I spend plenty of time in shallow water. We headed straight to the jetties in the morning. When we arrived we found some big schools of bait up on the surface but nothing was feeding. We threw big Rapala diving plugs for a while without a hit. I got bored and grabbed my topwater rod to see if I could get something to the surface. It didn’t take long before I was hooked up. I didn’t expect to catch anything. I only wanted to see some action.
The fish fought very weird for a Jack, so we thought I might have hooked something else. The fish didn’t make any hard runs but it stayed deep. Every time I was I got it close it would run under the boat. About a 20 minute battle I finally landed a 25lb Jack, my biggest Jack to date. I landed it on light tackle. I was throwing a TTF Gun Dog Dummy on my redfish setup (Shimano Cumara M rod and Shimano Curado 50E reel). I was drained after that fight so I took the hook off my topwater and continued casting. Scott and I many blowups but Scott couldn’t hook with anything except a big brown bird. We gotr bored at the jetties so we decided to run the beachfront. We covered many miles of beach but never saw any signs of life.
I was throroughly impressed with Scott’s East Cape Fury. It took chop very well and stayed almost completely dry the entire trip. We ran across a lot of rough, open water and his boat never missed a beat. The Fury is a very stable platform that floats in next to nothing. East Cape is definitely on the short list of possible boats for my first skiff.
