Sabine Pass is where the Sabine River gives up and lets the Gulf have it, a ship channel on the Texas and Louisiana line with a refinery glow on one bank and marsh grass on the other. It is not a pretty place, and the people who fish it would like to keep it that way. In October the water cools and the southern flounder that spent all summer scattered across the bays line up and head for the Gulf to spawn. They move with the tide down the channel edges, and for a few weeks the whole town fishes for one flat fish.
I went with a retired tugboat deckhand I will call Dub, who has fished the run for forty years and keeps a notebook of moon phases that he will not let anyone read. We stood on the rocks of the jetty at first light with the fog lifting off the channel and a shrimp boat idling past so close we could smell the diesel. Dub rigged me a quarter ounce jighead with a chartreuse curly tail and a strip of cut mullet on the hook, which he called insurance. The method is to cast up current, let it hit bottom and drag it back along the rocks slow enough to bore a child.
A flounder does not hit like a fish. It hits like a drawer closing. The line goes heavy, then nothing, and the beginner sets the hook right then and pulls the bait out of its mouth. Dub said to count to three. I counted to three and still missed the first two. On the third I waited until the line started to move sideways, and the rod bent into something that felt like a wet dinner plate doing its best. It came up brown and flat with both eyes on one side, looking offended, nineteen inches on the tape and the ugliest beautiful fish on the coast.
We stayed through the falling tide. Dub caught five to my three, and let me know it without saying a word, which is a skill. A game warden came down the rocks to check licenses and the fish box, and Dub asked him how the run was going elsewhere. The warden said he could not say, and then said it anyway. Everyone at Sabine Pass is in on it.
Driving out past the refinery, I asked Dub whether the fish would be there tomorrow. He checked his notebook, closed it, and said the flounder knew more about it than he did, but they were not talking either.
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