It’s been a long spring for Lake Livingston anglers. The rains and muddy waters and all the logs coming down from the Trinity River have put a wrench in the white bass fishing … the lake’s summer staple. But finally, it’s here, big time!
I think of myself as Michael Richardson’s “default customer.” It’s tough to get on his schedule in peak season so I tell him, “Hey Michael, I sold my boat, I’m old and I don’t have anything to do. When you get a cancellation, give me a call … I’ll go on the spur of the moment.” So, when Michael called last Monday night I jumped at the chance. I called Cary Purdy (Lake Livingston Fishing Club’s technical whiz). “Cary, Michael can go in the morning; he claims he is getting his limit within an hour. You want to go?” It took Cary about five seconds to sign on, and I added, “If we really catch our limit in an hour, I want to see if I can catch a gar on my fly rod.”
Catching a sizeable alligator gar on a fly rod has been on my bucket list for several years. Michael and I even talked about towing my kayak out and trying to catch one from the kayak, but we both agreed that that was no sport for old men. But he was game for trying from his boat. As many of you know from past Hookers programs, alligator gar are amazing fish. Once considered a “trash fish,” nowadays they are a Texas Treasure. They swam with the dinosaurs. They have no natural enemies because of their remarkable triple layer of scales and their double row of teeth. They look like alligators, but there is no recorded incidence of a gar biting a person. Unlike common “wisdom,” they don’t eat game fish … their diet is mostly trash fish, like carp and drum … both readily available in our lake. Their biggest enemy is the fact that spawning requires very specific conditions, conditions that we had in 2015.
The result from that 2015 spawn is that our lake has lots of gar, now five-six feet long weighing 80-100 pounds. They are not all that difficult to catch and are lots of fun! But on a fly rod? We will see.
We left the boat ramp at 6:45 a.m. (a late morning for Michael but as he knows, I can’t drive until after sunrise!). Cary was right on time … I’ve never known him to be late for fishing! It took Michael about 15 minutes to find the whites, and after that it was game on! Carey had the hot hand to start with, but I soon got the Hollenbeck twitch going (feared by fish worldwide) and caught my share. We had 50 whites in the cooler by 7:45 and I said, “Let’s go get a gar.”
We were only 10 minutes from a cove where Michael had seen lots of gar rolling recently. (Why do gar roll? To get air … turns out they can breathe both water and air, thanks to special structures in the air sac.) Michael had saved some carp for bait, and he soon had a chunk of cut bait on Cary’s rod and told me, “George, rig up your fly rod.”
If the truth be known, I don’t think either Michael or Cary thought I could land a big gar. In fact, they thought a gar would destroy my fly rod. Little did they know, although my fly rod may be no bigger than my finger and taper to about the size of a pencil lead, it was a work of art and science that was nine feet long and weighed only several ounces. That rod hadn’t come cheap, of course, but my wife had gifted it to me when I wore a younger man’s clothes and was headed to the Amazon to catch peacock bass!
Before I could get my fly rod rigged up, Cary’s line started moving. A gar had picked it up and was taking the bait. We were so focused on rigging the fly rod that we hardly noticed that he had a fish on … we avoided the gar angler’s most common mistake ... setting the hook too soon. Cary set the hook and had a nice gar on that treated us to a long run and a couple of jumps when it got near the boat. We were delighted with Cary’s 30-pounder.
When we got rigged up, Michael helped me chunk the bait about 15 yards from the boat. We waited expectantly … for about one minute when a gar took the bait and started running. My fly reel was turning furiously, busting my knuckles, but I gave Michael a quick lesson on how to set the hook on a fly rod. That’s when the fish really took off, beginning a 20-minute battle around the cove. A fly rod line is only about 100 feet long but has running line (on my reel about 200 yards of 50 pound “running line,” what we call “backing.” It didn’t take but a minute for that gar to have about 100 yards of backing out and Michael said, “That fish is way over by that bulkhead. We better start following him with the trolling motor.” As we got closer, the fish started for a dock in an effort to get tangled among timbers and break the line. I’ll give Michael credit; he is not used to fighting big fish but he maneuvered the boat perfectly and we kept the fish away from the dock and back into clear water.
Eventually, we got the fish closer and were able to see her (all big gar are females) and we realized we had a sizeable gar. Michael got a rope around the girth of the gar and pulled her in, and we started our whooping and hollering and picture-taking before slipping the gar back in the water and watching her swim away.
By alligator gar standards, this was not a big gar. The famous Trinity gar fisherman Kirk Kirkland last year caught one weighing 283 pounds. Very likely, according to our District Inland Fisheries Biologist Dan Ashe, our gar was part of the 2015 spawn, five-six feet long and weighing somewhere in the 80–100-pound range. So, some might say, “nice fish, but small.” And, other naysayers might say, “You weren’t really fly fishing … you got that fish on, cut bait, not an artificial fly that you have tied yourself.” And in both cases, they are right. I’d reply, “Yep, true on both counts; but not bad for an 87-year-old geezer on Lake Livingston and wait until next time.”
Thanks to Michael Richardson of Lake Livingston Adventures and my friend Cary, both who helped land that fish. Give it a try … fishing for alligator gar is not for the faint of heart, but it is great fun.
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