I know they come in the bay with the tide at SLP and the reds are right behind them. Sometimes the water turns brown there are so many.

 

You witnessed part of a shad run. A shad run is the same as a salmon run. Both are "anadromous" fish, meaning they can live in fresh as well as salt water. Salmon leave the sea to come back home (where they were hatched) in fresh water rivers, to spawn. Salmon then die. Shad do the same thing, but they do not die. Other species that return to fresh water to spawn, are herring, smelt, American eels, and striped bass. If these are American shad, their roe is considered a delicacy. I know I love it!

 

Interesting. I didn't know they did that.

Is it a once a year thing?

 

Permit Rat pretty much nailed it...most all the "runs" have to do with movement to or from spawning areas.

 

I don't believe they were American Shad. More likely would be Menhaden which a lot of people call Shad.
Menhaden stay in saltwater.

 

What you are seeing is Gulf Menhaden. They are a species of herring not shad but are often called shad or pogies. They spawn in the winter waters of the near shore gulf, in the summer huge schools can be found running not far off the beach front. There are even purse seine operations and "Pogie Plants" in Sabine Pass and Louisiana. I don't know if you still can but used to you could go to the plant and buy a 50lb crate of them for about $25 bucks. That's lots and lots of bait, if you fish offshore a lot that is the way to go. Much cheaper than Spanish sardines at the bait shop and it is very fresh since they flash freeze them.

 

So thats what pogie is then?

I used to work for Air Logistics in Intracoastal City, LA, filling up those portable tanks with jet fuel for the helicopters. I had to deliver fuel to a site next to a pogie plant and it was a very pungent, smothering smell all around that place. I hated the days when I had to deliver there.

 

They were menhaden, commonly called pogey. They school for protection. After WWII they had schools up to 40 miles long off the coast of Virginia. The purse seine pogey boats with spotter planes have decimated the big schools and these boats are illegal in all Atlantic states now except Virginia (where Omega Protein is based, with considerable political clout) and also half of North Carolina. Small pogies up in the bays are called "peanuts" and they filter plankton from the water in massive amounts. Still netted in Louisiana. The plants in Fernandina Beach FL, Cameron La. and Sabine Pass, Tx are now history, though I'm not positive about Cameron, haven't been there lately. Back in the 1960s we could smell the Sabine plant, where Keith Lake now empties into the ship channel, from downtown Port Arthurâ€"the smell was that bad. The plant in Cameron back then just gave away the big wooden boxes full, if you stopped and asked and could breathe there. The Cameron snapper partyboats used nothing but pogey for bait.

Here's an excellent read on this schooling baitfish:

http://discovermagazine.com/2001/sep/featfish

 

Here's an excellent read on this schooling baitfish:

http://discovermagazine.com/2001/sep/featfish

Interesting article. Who knew bait fish were so important to so many areas of life?

 

Everything from inshore flounder to bluefin tuna offshore feed on menhaden. This summer we saw a school of these fish just east of Sabine, in Louisiana waters. Then a spotter plane showed up and circled for hours. Here came to big purse seine boats. They worked the school over and we didn't see pogies for two weeks after. Not sure if these net boats are still allowed off Texas, but they should have been outlawed 20 years ago. That's when sometimes a thousand bull redfish would float up dead at High Island beach, along with a few tarpon. Just as the Louisiana pogey fleet left the area. Bycatch is a problem, when your nets are about 800 yards long.

 

It's been along while sonce I bought any I did not know the Sabine plant closed.

 

That's real a shame. I'm not a heavy environmentalist, but its troubling to read and learn about things like this.

 

I like the smell of the Pogey plant at Cameron in late Nov and Dec.....smells like FLOUNDER.

 

Ahhhhh! So shad = pogie in Texas! Glad to know that. So here is a 2-part question:

Is this shad/pogie run a common occurance in Texas in the fall? Is there a Spring run too? My guess is that a lot of these menhaden are too big for the average So. Texas trout, redfish and snook, but are there smaller ones too? I bet the tarpon love them, even the bigger ones.

Along those lines, is there a defined mullet run in the Spring and fall?

 

Just the fall mullet run, they're six inches long and start schooling up just after Labor Day, and head south along the beach in big numbers. There are no other defined runs of baitfish, that I know of. The pogies just come and go. They're always the first adversely effected by a red tide. Or even low oxygen levels.

Ahhhhh! So shad = pogie in Texas! Glad to know that. So here is a 2-part question:

Is this shad/pogie run a common occurance in Texas in the fall? Is there a Spring run too? My guess is that a lot of these menhaden are too big for the average So. Texas trout, redfish and snook, but are there smaller ones too? I bet the tarpon love them, even the bigger ones.

Along those lines, is there a defined mullet run in the Spring and fall?

 

Last w/e they were heavy just off the first bar on the upper Matty beach. Pelicans worked them over. Just before dark with the incoming tides they crashed the bar and came into the first gut. The BULLS followed. The redfish would corner them against the beach. We actually watched bulls with their backs out of the water feeding on them. One of the coolest sights I've ever seen!

 

Forgot about those anchovies, it's been a while since I saw the fall run. Even the manta rays like them. And glass minnows on South Padre, they call them rain minnows. Might be a different species. The tarpon really gulp them down. I think Thomas Gibson caught his state record tarpon, fishing the rain minnows at South Padre in early November. If memory serves.