Darrell Skillern

“My dad was a cabinetmaker, and I worked for him. He worked until seven every evening, seven days a week, so that afforded me the privilege of getting out a little bit earlier and getting a morning in, I’d meet somebody, and we’d go out for a little while. I usually got off on the weekends or I’d take a day off during the week to go fishing. We were doing a lot of houses in Whispering Pines at the time, and the bay was right there. We would have everything ready to go and run down there and BAM, come right back.” 

“A friend of mine was guiding a group from Schlumberger Oil Company,” continued Darrell. “He told me they hunted three days a week, but he was going to take a different job through a different outfitter. They were hunting through Forest West, who was an outfitter at that time. My friend said I want them to get somebody good, would you come take ‘em?  This was hunting, not fishing,” clarified Darrell. “So, I agreed to do it, I could take them in the morning and still get to work. I then began to take them fishing on the weekends and started taking others as well. At some point I said, this is what I really want to do. So, I quit being a cabinetmaker and started taking people hunting and fishing and had a heck of a time at it, a lot of fun. I met a lot of super, super, neat people. If I wasn’t running duck hunts in the winter, we were on the water because the bay was pretty much empty during hunting season. There wasn’t anybody in your way, you could go wherever you wanted to, we loved it!” he said with a smile.   

“During that period of time, when fishing was at its prime, you would see rafts of mullet as big as this museum, you could almost walk on top of them. There would be acres of them on the shoreline and for some reason we don’t see that anymore, I don’t know why. There was a point when they actually netted mullet for the row (fish eggs) in them. I don’t know whether they do that anymore, but I don’t think they do. You could pull up and get out of the boat, wade fishing, and throw floating lures and in a little bit start catching trout from underneath ‘em. You would see them all up and down East Bay, West Bay, even Trinity Bay, then the jackfish would come in through those schools, busting those mullet and they would come flying out of the water. Now they’re busted up by sharks, we don’t see the jackfish coming in here like we used to. I often wonder if those Jack fish didn’t follow them in ‘cause they typically catch jackfish in the surf,” said Darrell quizzically. 

“The spawn of red fish should occur in or near the mouth of the passes. Sometimes right in the mouth between the jetties at a place we call Fleenor Flats, or down on Bolivar Row, or right at the edge of East Beach, or out in front of the boat cut, or the mouth of San Louis Pass. Anywhere out in that area, and those red fish are big. They’re 32 . . . 42 . . . 45 inchers, big ones, and they’re surf runners. We never, ever in all my years of fishing, ever caught them that big in the bay, and if we caught a rare one that was a 45 incher it would be down closer to the passes.  Once the red fish spawn their eggs are carried into the Bay by the tide, where they hatch and stay until they get up to about thirty inches long, then they go back to the mouth of the Gulf to spawn then out into the Gulf, never to return. They become surf runners, and the cycle repeats itself. When I was fishing in the beginning, all the red fish we caught in the back of these bays, like in the mouth of the Trinity River, mouth of Reds, up in front of Double Bayou, in front of Rollover Pass, all the different places, they were in what we call “The Slot,” they were twenty six, twenty-eight, thirty, maybe thirty-one or thirty-two inches occasionally. But now, the red fish in the back of the bay, they’re there all the time, they never leave and some are forty-four, forty-six, forty-eight inchers, they are hatchery reds that don’t know to go to the Gulf. They just don’t know what to do,” he explained. 

“So now what’s happening, those big reds, we call them bull reds, they’re in the mouth of the bay in a marauding school. We’d pull up and hit a school and they’d be all over-sized red fish, forty-inchers, and they never used to ever be in the bay, not ever, not in the back of this bay,” Darrell stressed emphatically. “They should be in the mouth of the passes, so they’re not going there to spawn. Just like any other fish that you hatch, like salmon, they put them in hatchery tanks beside the river. They get them up to fingerling size and they open a little two-inch opening, and the fingerlings go out into the river and away they go. Well, when they came back to spawn, what did they do? They swam back to that same opening and tried to get back in there, because that is where they were spawned. Often times they died right there without ever spawning. So, the natural programming of the reds is off. Instead of spawning them and dumping their eggs in the surf, they’re raising them to fingerling size and turning them out. Now, they don’t know where to go, they want to get back to where they were spawned, so they never go to the surf. That’s why we are catching the bigger reds in the Bay now,” clarified Darrell. 

“When I first started fishing there was a little bit of bulkheading around Crawley’s Bait Camp, but not too much. Most of the shoreline was natural. The back of the bay had long-stemmed core grass against the bank, that’s what cushions the bank and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I’m not an expert on all the sea grasses. Dave Wilcox is and a lot of other people around this area, but I’m not, but there should be sea grass out in front and the waves should break on it. Then the waves roll in and hit the long-stemmed core grass and the long-stemmed core grass just lays down and then springs back up. That cushions the shoreline, it’s your breakwater, so to speak. When it’s not there the waves break on the shoreline . . . and break on it . . . and create silt, which kills the sea grasses. There’s a lot of things that create silt, one thing is the dredging of the Intracoastal Canal. For many years while dredging it, they dumped the silt into the most convenient spot, which is right back into the bay. They have since built places all down through there where they can dump and skim it off, but through the years up and down the shoreline they got it on top of reefs in west bay, which killed them. The refuge has got some stuff going on down there that’s worth a trip down there to look at it. They’ve done a really good job, and it works. They built a half-moon shape retainer wall with rocks that is just the right height, so when the tide comes in it breaks over and the silt gets deposited behind it, then the grass begins to grow. The long-stemmed core grass is there, it just needs to be protected long enough to get it up. They could stagger these and reclaim a lot of shoreline that ‘s been lost. Texas loses twelve to fifteen hundred acres of coastline a year due to subsidence, due to the fact they’ve jettied every river and outlet we have, and the outlets are where the shoreline replenishes itself. A prime example of this is the mouth of the Mississippi River. What has happened is the silt has built up further and further out, so you have a channeled river straight out, but the insides have deteriorated due to the levees and rock jetties down its banks. Twenty miles out from the mouth of the Mississippi, you have a lump in 650 feet of water where the silt has been deposited, they call it the Midnight Lump. It’s a phenomenal place to catch tuna and all kinds of stuff. But that’s why the shoreline doesn’t replenish itself.  The silt should come out of the river and go down the beach front instead of going out. If you go to the north jetty and go through the boat cut and immediately turn left, you will run aground.  It’s just a flat out there where all the silt has been deposited, that’s what would have happened if they had left openings in the jetties they’ve built. It would still have given you protection for ships coming in and out but also allow the silt to go down the beach,” he explained.      

“I fished with a lot of great guys; I remember one time we were in the back of East Bay and I had Chris Cloch and Bill Miller with me. We’re catching them and man it was good. Chris was looking at his watch and saying, ‘I told my wife I’d be home, it’s getting’ late, Darrell,’ I asked Bill, ‘William, what do you want to do,’ he said, ‘Ha, we’re staying,’ I said, ‘Chris,’ he answered, ‘Ah, maybe one more school,’ so we get on another school and pretty soon, it's when he’s supposed to be home and we’ve got a box full of fish. This was before cell phones, so we had to come all the way from East Bay to Fort Anahuac Park where we put in and it’s dark now, so I’m flying by the seat of my pants to get back. We pulled in and Chris was frantic, saying what am I going to do, what am I going to do? I told him, ‘Go up there to the pay phone at the grocery store and call your wife and say only this, just say, I’m fine, I’m okay, I’ll explain everything when I get home. Then hang the phone up. He came running back to where I was cleaning fish and said, ‘I said exactly what you told me, now, what am I going to do when I get home?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but you.ve got about an hour and a half to figure out something, you’ve got to make up a lie is all I can tell you.’ We had a pretty good laugh out of that one,” laughed Darrell, relishing the memory. “Man, there were many more, many more of those, that’s the kind of stuff that I miss,” noted Darrell with a touch of melancholy. 

“I remember one particular day I took a group down towards Smith Point where I’d been catching quite a few, but the wind switched on me and I couldn’t quite get to the fish . . . we were wade fishing. We hit on one or two, they were there, but we couldn’t get them to bite. So, I left and went to East Bay, the water was air clear in East Bay. I moved around and moved around, and I was kind of wearing my old customers out, I moved them so much and we really didn’t have much in the cooler. So, I decided I was going to get out and walk the shallow water to see if I could find some red fish. I walked down the shoreline, but I had kind of older guys with me, so they sat in the boat. I was walking down the bank in knee deep water and saw something in the shallow water, and it looked like a red. So, I cast out, I had a spoon on, and BAM . . . I’m on! Well, it wasn’t a red fish, it was a trout, so I started catching them. I took my hat off and started waving at the old guys, they were way down the shoreline. Finally, they saw me and came down to where I was, and we caught forty-two trout!” Darrell exclaimed with satisfaction. “We had thirty fish over five pounds and of the thirty, more than fifteen were over seven pounds.”

“One time we were on Number Five, Number Five was in the Bolivar Field, and it had a piling on it at that time. The guy that was over that oil company left that piling there ‘cause it was the only way he could find that reef. So, we’re on Number Five and there’s a storm cell back towards Bolivar coming towards us. I looked back to the north and there’s another cell that stretched all the way across the horizon.  I thought, ‘What in the world is going on?’ Back then we didn’t have this,” said Darrell picking up his cell phone. “There was no way to know what was going on, just a marine radio, and a lot of the time it was ‘beep, beep, beep, small boats, small craft, you need to get in right now.’ So anyway, we’re on Number Five and we’re just flipping them in, as fast as we can catch ‘em. I had a man and a woman in the boat and the man flipped a fish in and just as he did, the hook stuck in his forearm. Jimmy West was there beside me, he saw what happened and said I’ll get it out. So, he hopped over into my boat and tied a string on it to snatch it out. Just as he went to snatch it out a lightning bolt went Phew-BAM, real close and he jerked at the same time. The guy never knew it came out. About that time, I said, ‘we’ve gotta go!’ so Jimmy headed back to Port Bolivar and I’m in the sandwich between both cells. I took off running for my life to the base of the Texas City Dike, there were some bait camps there. I had a built-in cooler on this nineteen-foot Mako, and it was just big enough for two people to sit, and the couple were both sitting on it. I let the hammer down and it was getting rougher . . . and rougher . . . and rougher! I get to the dock and run up and tie off to the cleat and lightning’s already getting on us pretty good. The lid had fallen in on the cooler and both of them were wedged in that cooler, I had to pull them out so we could get inside to safety.  The wind had broken the wind gauge at 110 miles per hour and blown all the windows off Crawley's Bait Camp. There were about thirteen boats sunk in the bay by the jetties during that storm,” stressed Darrell.