Just for a moment, put yourself in the shoes (OK, OK – fins) of a big speckled trout. You’ve been relaxing in a mud flat in the East Matagorda bay. Finally, what you’ve been waiting for comes to pass; the light starts to peek through winter cloud cover, warming the shallows where you’ve been waiting out the winter.

You start to move, cruising right along the flat until you see it – your favorite spot to feed. The patch of mud with its shell pad is a familiar landmark and you think back happily about years past when you would happily fill up on all you can eat shrimp and finger mullet. Your stomach immediately starts to grumble as you recall these feasts.

You take up your favored feeding spot right where the mud meets the shell bed, watching the water above you for signs of a meal. You spot a delicious looking six inch mullet at two o’ clock and get ready to spring into action.

Before the mullet even knows what happened, you’re drifting back to the bottom feasting on your first catch of the season.

Only a moment later you see another one; this one looks like it’s wounded. An easy catch, you chuckle to yourself as you prepare to pounce.

Your spotted body jumps back into attack mode and seals the wounded mullet’s fate. Only this time the mullet fought back.

A fierce head shake hurls the previous 6-inch mullet from your jaws; but the invisible, pulling force never ceases. You grow tired and succumb to the grip of a Boga at your lip.

“10 pounds!” is yelled by a man bundled up beneath layers of outerwear.

Two other men approach, admiringly looking you over. Is that a camera flash you see?

Finally they unhook you and pit you back in the water, exhausted but relieved to have survived the ordeal.

As you swim away, you hear a voice in the distance exclaiming “That’s a Corky Fat Boy For You.” Are they talking about you? You haven’t even started to bulk up for the year; but you resolve to look closer at your prey next time around.

If this is how a trophy trout really understood us when we talked, they’d know that in being tricked by the lure, they were making an angler’s dream a reality.

When word broke out that James Wallace broke the state’s speckled trout record, an infection had spread across the gulf coast; fishermen turned to an arsenal of Corky’s, a slow sinking soft bait, when hunting for the trout of their lifetime. Packing the size of a topwater and the wobble of a broken-back, the tempting attraction of a slow retrieved Corky in winter is just flat out effective for trophy specks.

“It got crazy when Wallace caught that fish,” states B&L Corky founder, Paul Brown. “Anglers poured into our shop and literally bought every single Corky off the shelf.” Even after so many years, this Corky craze hasn’t slowed in the Brown family’s Houston-based shop.

Port Mansfield fishing guide, Captain Mike McBride definitely knows a thing or two about Corky’s and uses a unique retrieve to fool lower coast specks.

“You work your lures a bit differently based on what part of the coast you’re on, but I try to pop the knot off while trying to keep up with the slack if at all possible,” says McBride. Contrary to the advice you’ll find in many of the fishing reports, Captain McBride doesn’t generally go with the slower than slow approach many use. He instead uses more aggressive movements which mimic the behavior of real baitfish, which as he points out is the beauty of a Corky in the first place.

Captain Jesse Arsola, a Matagorda trophy-trout guide, swears by a particular science when working Corky’s.

“When you’re dealing with trout who are in an aggressive mood they’ll bite just about anything. However, those times when you have to work at it to get them interested, that is when your technique really matters.”

“I use a counting system when I fish with a Corky. It’s actually pretty simple. I count how many seconds until the lure hits bottom, then I try switching up the time I let it sink before I take the slack out of the line. Then I just figure out what count I’m on when I get the most bites. If there’s an easier way to tell where the specks are feeding in a water column, I haven’t found it yet.”

Clear Lake tournament angler Captain John Havens prefers the Corky Devil in white, chartreuse or gold and uses a more or less standard retrieve.

“All you have to do is to make sure you keep in constant contact with the lure so you can tell when you have even the littlest nibble,” Havens says. He lifts the rod and gives it one or two twitches before letting his lure fall, the only variation this expert angler uses in his retrieve.