Fishing Yesterday's Gulf Coast

by Farley, Barney

• ISBN13: 9781585441655
• ISBN10: 1585441651
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-10-01
• Publisher: Texas A & M Univ Pr

Summary

Renowned fishing guide Barney Farley worked the Texas coastal waters out of Port Aransas for more than half a century. In these stories and reflections, Farley imparts a lifetime of knowledge about fish -- silver trout, sand trout, speckled trout, redfish, ling, catfish, jack, kingfish, you name it -- and gives advice about how to fish, where to fish, and when to fish.

Perhaps no one could chronicle the changes in sport and commercial fishing along the Central Texas Coast more ably and more passionately than Farley. When he came to Texas in 1910, he reported that he could get in a rowboat and using only a push pole, make his way "to the fishing grounds and catch a hundred pounds or more of trout and redfish" in a few hours. A couple of years later, the shrimp trawlers arrived. As they plied the Gulf in increasing numbers, they depleted the shrimp populations in the bays, and Farley watched the fish move farther and farther offshore, following their ever more elusive food source.

From his perspective in the mid-1960s, Farley was not satisfied simply to lamen

Author Biography

Barney Farley was a Port Aransas fishing guide whose memories and stories about fishing the Texas coast were compiled over several decades and completed in the 1960s. Their posthumous publication is sponsored by the Harvey Weil Sportsman Conservationist Award Trust of Corpus Christi

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
George S. Hawn
About Barney Farley	xi
Introduction	xv
Larry McEachron
President Roosevelt as I Knew Him	3	(10)
The Truth about Fishing and How We Can Improve It	13	(7)
Laguna Madre	20	(1)
Castles in the Sea	20	(10)
Fly Rod Fishing	30	(4)
Skipjacks on a Fly Rod	34	(6)
Tarpon	40	(8)
A Winter Fishing Story	48	(7)
How to Own an Outboard Motorboat and Still Be Popular	55	(3)
Tackle	58	(5)
Surf Fishing	63	(6)
Kingfish	69	(5)
Trout Fishing	74	(9)
Redfish	83	(4)
Trout and Reds along a Channel Shoreline	87	(6)
Drum	93	(6)
Rod Benders: Jack Crevalle and Pompano	99	(7)
Choice Food: Jewfish and Sheepshead	106	(6)
Males That Incubate	112	(4)
Other Fish in the Sea	116	(6)
Crab Fishing	122	(3)
Sharks I Have Met	125	(7)
Big Shark, Little Boat	132	(5)
I Fished at the End of a Rainbow	137