Saltwater Fishing Forecast: Solid Trout, Reds, and Flounder Bites Along Texas Gulf Coast

Name’s Artificial Lure, checking in with your Texas Gulf report. We’re sliding into a classic winter pattern along the Middle and Upper Coast. Texas Parks and Wildlife’s latest saltwater report says water temps are mid‑60s, with fishing **good overall** if you key on deep structure and bait concentrations. Redfish Bay, San Antonio Bay, Port Aransas and Baffin are all holding fish. Along the **Galveston / Freeport** stretch, tides4fishing and NOAA show a softer tide cycle today, with modest highs and lows and “average” solunar activity. That usually means you want to fish the **moving water windows** hard: early morning drop and the mid‑afternoon push. Sunrise on this part of the coast is right around 7:15 a.m., sunset about 5:35–5:40 p.m., so your best feeding flurries should bracket those times. Weather‑wise, winter gulf pattern: cool mornings, milder afternoons, light to moderate south‑southeast breeze. That wind stacks bait on windward shorelines and pushes water and life up against shell and grass. Cloud cover just makes it better for trout. Reports from TPWD’s saltwater roundup have it like this: - **Trout & reds**: San Antonio Bay and Galveston complex are giving up solid specks and reds on **live shrimp** over the flats and along channel edges, plus over shell in 3–6 feet. Trout are coming deeper off rock edges and dropoffs in ship channels. - **Redfish**: Redfish Bay and Port Aransas are seeing strong shallow redfish bites on **cut mullet, shrimp, and silver spoons**, with oversize reds on cut crab and mullet off the jetties. - **Flounder**: Creeks and drains on an **outgoing tide**, picking off bait flushed from the marsh, on mud minnows and soft plastics. - **Surf mix**: Corpus and open Gulf beaches are giving up pompano, whiting, trout, drum and reds in the first and second gut on shrimp, Fishbites and live mullet when the water’s clean. Artificial selection is very much a winter game now. Guides out of Baffin are leaning on: - **Soft plastics** with rattles or “corky‑style” suspending baits in darker colors like **Dark Vader**, watermelon red, or golden bream. - **Paddle‑tail plastics** on light jigheads, slow‑rolled near bottom. - **Imitation shrimp** or Gulp! shrimp under a popping cork in 2–4 feet. Work ’em slow, almost painfully so; most bites are low in the water column. Live and dead bait still rule numbers: - **Best bait right now**: live shrimp, finger mullet, mud minnows, and cut mullet. Dead shrimp for drum and sheepshead around rocks and pilings. - In the surf, shrimp or Fishbites tipped with a small piece of cut bait in the first gut is putting pompano, whiting, and slot reds on the sand. A couple of **hot spots** to circle: - **Galveston South Jetty / Ship Channel rocks**: Trout, reds, drum and sheepshead on live shrimp and soft plastics bounced down the rocks. On calm days, oversize reds on cut crab on the Gulf side. - **San Luis Pass and adjacent bay reefs**: Work the tide swings with plastics and shrimp under co This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI.