The sight of gulls diving toward the water had meant that speckled trout and redfish were feeding below all morning on Lake Sabine.

As my partner Howard Hammonds and I worked on a limit of trout, we both cast an Old Bayside soft plastic shrimp into the action and instantaneously had our rods doubled over.

“They must be reds the way they’re fighting,” Hammonds said.

However, as we reeled in the fish on the other end of our lines, we realized they were not reds but super-sized croaker. Both of these fish weighed nearly two and a half pounds apiece.

During the course of the morning, we caught several more huge croakers while seeking trout under the birds and according to other anglers we talked to on the water, they were experiencing the same thing.

“I haven’t seen croaker this big in a very long time,” said one angler who said he had caught half a dozen measuring between 12 and 17 inches.

That was nearly two years ago and since then I and many other anglers on the Gulf Coast have seen a huge comeback of croaker in our bay systems and it has everything to do with a massive reduction in shrimping related byctach.

Shrimp trawls according to National Marine Fisheries Service officials were annually scooping over a billion croaker along the Gulf Coast but now with shrimping effort at record lows from a combination of a buyback program in Texas, competition from imported shrimp and rising fuel costs these small, delicious fish are coming back.

Do you remember the big croaker run at Rollover Pass?

That used to be an annual tradition but few anglers of this generation have ever heard of it.

However, that could be changing as more anglers report catch truly big croaker while seeing speckled trout and other species.