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Texas Parks and Wildlife (TPWD) may soon decide how many spotted trout are caught along the state’s coast.
The agency held meetings in Texas coastal cities last week, gathering comments from professional fishing guides, recreational anglers and the public at large on what spotted trout fishing regulations they would like to see.
The meetings were prompted by comments TPWD received since the agency lifted temporary sea trout regulations in late August. Those regulations, where anglers could only catch three trout per day between 17 and 23 inches, were put in place by TPWD in response to a fish kill from Texas’ 2021 winter storm.
Around 160,000 spotted seatrout died, making up around half of the game fish killed during the freeze.
Most of the trout killed were in the lower Laguna Madre bay system, which surrounds Laguna Vista, Port Isabel and South Padre Island. Fishing guides attending the Port Isabel meeting told representatives that they continue to notice the freeze’s impact, noting that the trout they did see were hardly hitting the regulation limit.
“I’m personally not seeing the bigger, upper slot trout that we were seeing before the freeze, the anywhere from the 17 to 23 inch, 24 inch range,” said Ernest Cisneros, a Laguna Madre area fishing guide for 27 years.
“We're seeing a lot of little trout — a lot of 15, 16, 17 inch trout. But we're not seeing the larger trout in good numbers the way we had them before,” he added.
Cisneros and several guides who attended the meeting came to a mostly uniform consensus: The fishing isn’t what it used to be, and more regulation is probably necessary. Several wanted to see the trout limit back at three per angler. Some wanted no oversize fish to be caught. Currently, Texas anglers can catch up to five trout between 15 and 25 inches, with one of those fish being oversized.
According to TPWD, spotted trout are below the 10-year average, based on the fish the agency has caught during surveys. But the effects on trout from those regulations could take some more time.
Through the 1980s, three freezes killed tens of millions of fish along the Texas coast. TPWD issued similar conservation measures that helped bring back some of those trout in two to three years, though they weren’t as large.
Leading up to the meetings, Jason Ferguson, TPWD’s Lower Laguna Madre ecosystem leader, said that the agency had heard opinions from anglers across the state.
“It had been pretty evenly split, as far as keeping it the same versus some kind of stricter regulation like what we had for the temporary [regulations after the freeze],” he said.
The agency’s commission issued an emergency order regulating spotted trout fishing in the lower Laguna Madre from April to September 2021. Normal regulations continued until March 2022, when TPWD issued a separate, temporary limit on spotted trout from Matagorda Bay to the lower Laguna Madre, finding that the population was still lower than normal. That order was lifted in late August.
TPWD said at least 274 people attended the six meetings the agency held along the coast. In a statement, TPWD said it will summarize its findings and present them to the commission during its next meeting. The commission will then decide whether to issue regulations on spotted trout.
“Of all the places that I've ever gone to fish, this is my favorite place. And it's still world class because when you go fishing here, you have a chance,” Cisneros told TPR after the meeting. “There's places that I've gone where you go all day, maybe one bite or no bites. I've seen a decline and I certainly don't want our precious lower Laguna Madre to get to that point.”
TPWD's commission will meet on Nov. 2 in Austin.
