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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MSA" data-source="post: 344946" data-attributes="member: 193">Since I saw pictures of alligator gar in books in my elementary school library 35 years ago I've wanted to see them in real life.  We attempted to take this trip in 2020, but had to cancel due to covid.After 3 years of research and following the local fishing forums and Facebook pages I rented a VRBO lake house for a week on lake Livingston right by the Livingston dam on the Trinity.  [ATTACH]52719[/ATTACH][ATTACH]52720[/ATTACH]After getting settled in on Saturday, we headed to the dam area to scope things out, round up some bait, and at least wet some lines.  The shores were covered in trash, and trashy people, poaching in broad daylight, illegal size gar carcasses just left on shore and the boat ramps, my brother said Iraq was cleaner and had more decent people.  Now I cringe every time I see a Texas license plate up here.  Garbage aside, I cast netted some large shad, and we caught a variety of species on hook n line.  The water in that area was too shallow (1-3') to hold gar that evening so we didn't try.[ATTACH]52721[/ATTACH]Texas longear sunfish[ATTACH]52722[/ATTACH]Smalmouth buffalo[ATTACH]52723[/ATTACH]Blue crab and mullet make their way all the way up from the gulf over 100 miles away, and bull sharks have been caught in the area.  [ATTACH]52724[/ATTACH]Some gar carcasses left on the boat ramp[ATTACH]52725[/ATTACH]The Texas state seashell, very common along any shoreline[ATTACH]52726[/ATTACH]My kid caught all kinds of stuff wandering around with a jig n a worm, crappie, drum, bass, sunfish, blue cats, channel catsThe next morning we caught some drum, cut them in half or into three pieces and got some lines in further down the river where the water was deeper.[ATTACH]52727[/ATTACH]Within a minute of getting our third line in we had a run, and then another, and then all three lines were peeling off.  We let em run for about a minute to give them time to get the bait down into the gullet for good hook sets.  We landed 2 of the three, a couple in the 4 foot range.[ATTACH]52728[/ATTACH][ATTACH]52729[/ATTACH]And then run after run and muddy chaos ensued...the bait was harder to catch than the gar.  Everything we tried worked, mullet, drum, buffalo, carp, bowfin, shad, sunfish, bluegill, etc...  The biggest gar on day one was about 5 1/2 feet.[ATTACH]52730[/ATTACH][ATTACH]52731[/ATTACH][ATTACH]52732[/ATTACH]The following days we began missing alot more fish, our hook up ratio fell to maybe 10-20%. We had lost all of the 6/0 wide gap heavy duty treble hooks I brought to snags, and big gar cutting thru our braid with their sharp bony scales.  It also seemed alot of longnose gar had moved in the next day, I could see them surfacing for air along with the gator gar.  Longnose will take the bait, but since they have such a small but equally hard beak and an even smaller mouth, they're nearly impossible to hook.  I did manage to land one that got the leader wrapped around his nose.[ATTACH]52733[/ATTACH]By mid week we had experimented with several different hooks and found some that worked well, mustad 8/0 (paddlefish hooks for those of you who don't know hook sizes like myself) bronzed trebles that I sharpened and sanded a bit to speed up the rust process for the few gar that got the hook to deep for us to remove.   And some gar just smashed em flat before spitting it out.And I just got the nodak angler message that I can only upload 15 files per post, so I'll keep going via replies.</blockquote>

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