The Laguna Madre is one of the saltiest bodies of water on the planet, hypersaline is the technical word, and about as deep as a bathtub for miles at a stretch. That combination is why wade fishing the Texas Gulf Coast is a walking sport. You do not run to fish here. You park the boat a long way off, slide over the side into water that comes up to your belt, and then you go on foot across a seagrass flat in the dark, at roughly the speed of somebody who has misplaced their reading glasses.
Speckled trout are the reason. Sea trout, specks, whatever the sign at the bait shop says. They come up onto those grass flats at first light to eat shrimp and finger mullet, and they are absurdly sensitive to noise, which is a polite way of saying that everything you naturally want to do out there is wrong. Do not push a wake. Do not shuffle your feet loudly, though you must shuffle them, because stingrays live on that same bottom and have opinions about being stepped on. Slow feet, quiet hands, and a lot of patience for a fish that weighs less than a bag of sugar.
The man who taught our crew the flat was a retired refinery welder out of Port Mansfield who wades six mornings a week and refers to his stringer as "the paperwork." He watched us fan out across the prettiest water in sight, clean sand potholes shining up through the grass like dinner plates, and let us do it for forty minutes before he mentioned anything. Then he pointed at a stretch of murky, wind-scuffed nothing off to the west, the ugliest piece of water on the whole flat, and said, "That is where they eat. Pretty water is for photographs."
He was right, and he was smug about it in the gentlest possible way. The bite in that streaky brown water was not a thump. It was a sort of soft mugging, the lure just stopping, and then the head shakes started, quick and mean and nothing like a redfish. The big one came at maybe ten past seven, a trout with a yellow mouth and a back full of black freckles, long as a forearm, and she rolled on the surface twice out of pure indignation before we ever got a hand near her. Big trout are almost always females, and every wade fisherman on that coast will tell you they behave like they know it.
We let her go, which used to be an argument down there and is now mostly just manners. The welder finished the morning with more fish than the three of us combined and told us we had done fine, using the tone that men from that coast reserve for people who have done fine. Our legs were sunburned in a stripe exactly where the water line sat. Somewhere out on that flat there is prettier water than the piece that has all the fish in it, and we have learned to walk right past it.