Naughty Crawfish
Last weekend I went back to the Sabine River boat ramp in Hawkins to get that shiny magikarp. If you're never played pokemon, a shiny pokemon is a rare color variant. Therefore, an albino is "shiny." ;p I had a dull ache in the back of my head on the way there. I only got to fish for a short time because that dull ache turned into a full-blown migraine. I didn't get the albino carp, or any fish. Just turtles, sticks, and litter. Oh, and a crawfish. I felt something playing with the bait and thought it was another turtle so I reeled in the line. It was a crawfish; one pincer was clutching the bait and the other was waving menacingly at me. I would have taken its picture, but it let go and plopped back into the water.
I went home and laid down in the bed with the lights off. I felt better the next day and looked online for public access points to the Sabine. There were two in Gregg County in addition to the one in Longview that is closed for repairs; one is in White Oak and the other in Gladewater. I drove to them just to take a look. The "public" boat ramp in White Oak is not actually public, at least not anymore. It was gated off with a "NO TRESPASSING" sign.
On to the the Gladewater one. This one is in a park I've never heard of, Di-jac Park. It seems the public doesn't really know about this one, either. Despite it being Memorial Day weekend, the park only had an older couple and two teenage boys using it. The other public parks were PACKED.
Beside the parking lot are some picnic tables. From there you can walk down to the river or walk on a trail that runs on top of a ridge. The trail ends at the bottom of the ridge, where the Sabine has cut deep in the bedrock, leaving interesting rock formations. East Texas is very flat, so steep rocky cliffs are uncommon. The river at this point had rock at the bottom instead of sand or mud, also uncommon. I think that this spot might have some different species because the river substrate and the landscape is different. I didn't stay long enough to check because my migraine started coming back; I only snapped a few pictures of some mussel shells on the shore. I've been taking it easy this week. I'm going back to Di-jac Park this weekend to catch some of the microfish I saw swimming around in the shallows.