I did, and a redfish shot three feet out of the grass and mugged the fly. Disconcerted perhaps by a paranoid vision of falling overboard just then among all of those celebrating comeback kids, I broke him off on the strike.

As Glenn Perry and I learned during our two days of fishing with Naiser, there are now so staggeringly many redfish in the myriad bays and estuaries of coastal Texas that it is hard to imagine there was ever a time when there were next to none. And yet as recently as the mid-1970s, the red drum-a game and delicious everyman's fish, a sort of saltwater version of the largemouth bass, a Jimmy Stewart of a fish-was within spitting distance of disappearing entirely along the Texas coast and in many other parts of the Gulf of Mexico.

The problem was unregulated commercial and recreational fishing. Up until the late 70s, recreational fishermen in Texas had no limit on the number of redfish they could take. Neither did commercial fishermen, who posed a much graver threat to a resource that both consumer groups had come to believe, in the classic American way, was eternally renewable no matter how hard it was leaned on. While that belief might have been warranted at one point in the country's history, gasoline boat engines and manufactured ice had rendered it questionable by the middle of the 20th century, and during the 1970s it was made forevermore the equivalent of believing in a Tooth Fairy by the advent of light, tough, cheap, easy-to-run monofilament nets. With such nets, beach seiners were able to take up to 10,000 pounds of redfish in a single strike-and they did.

The more commercially caught redfish were made available in the markets around the country the more popular they became, and when wholesale prices shot from two-bits to a buck a pound, it seemed like everyone in Texas who could rig a trotline was getting into commercial fishing. The bays became so full of trotlines that many recreational boats installed cutters on their bows to avoid entangling their props. There was flagrant netting in sanctuaries and closed bays. And recreational anglers would occasionally be surrounded by nets as they fished-not that they were catching much anyway. Throughout Texas in the 70s sport-fishing catches of reds declined dizzyingly (to the point where catching anything at all was cause for celebration), and 1976 was declared a disaster year. Things had hit bottom so resoundingly that people were forced to notice.

It was one of those rare, sharply delineated moments in our history. Something in the natural world of incalculable value was about to be lost forever to greed and carelessness-a fleeting but articulate moment that begs for a few good men to put on their armor, conscript everyone they can find, and go do battle with the dragon. Fortunately for the redfish and his admirers, and to the lasting honor of the Lone Star State, there were just such men in Texas at that moment, and they were mad enough to fight another Alamo if necessary. On February 15, 1977, 14 of them met at Rudy Grigar's sportinggoods store in Houston, formed an organization called the Gulf Coast Conservation Association (GCCA), and the Texas Redfish War was officially declared.

The founders and early champions of the GCCA (which as the renamed Coastal Conservation Association, now has chapters in 15 Gulf Coast and Atlantic states, over 60,000 members nationwide, and an annual budget of around $20 million) were capable not only of getting mad but of getting even. Passionate sportfishermen and/or conservationists, many of them were also influential businessmen-such as financier Perry Bass and Exxon heir and GCCA Chairman from the beginning, Walter Fondren-who had both clout and finesse and knew how to use them. From the start the GCCA leadership realized the war could be won only if they succeeded on two levels-in enlisting membership and financial support throughout the state, and in getting laws enacted by the Texas Legislature as quickly as possible that would protect what was left of the fish stocks.

Perhaps the most serious of the early obstacles to both those goals was the lack of any scientific substantiation that the redfish truly was in serious and long-term trouble. At public hearings, commercial fishermen contended that there was no real shortage of reds, just too many carping recreational fishermen without enough skill to catch them; that the Gulf was an inexhaustible supplier of reds and trout and would continue to restock the bays regardless of how many fish were netted; and, that even if there was a temporary shortage of redfish it was not due to commercial over-harvesting but to too many recreational boats in the bays, high salinity due to low rainfall, or low salinity due to high rainfall. It was a formidable pile of manure that had been heaped up for years over the real issues, and the GCCA might have buried itself up to its axles in it had it not been for one man with a spade-the late Bob Kemp, then the director of fisheries for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and one of the firstrank heroes of the Redfish War.

Fighting off political pressure not to do so, Kemp initiated detailed bay surveys that provided the first scientific and indisputable proof of a serious statewide decline in redfish and speckled trout, with redfish being the more endangered; then he went on record as calling for catch restrictions. His findings and his position on those findings brought the GCCA heightened public awareness to swell its ranks and its war chest, and enough legitimacy and stroke in the Legislature to begin putting together an astonishing series of victories there. In 1979, a GCCA-backed bill was passed limiting recreational fishermen to catches of no more than 20 speckled trout and 10 redfish a day. In the following year, Texas became the first state in the country to ban single-strand monofilament nets. In April of 1981, after a titanic struggle, the Texas Legislature declared both redfish and speckled trout "gamefish" and outlawed the commercial taking of those fish from Texas waters. The passage of this "Redfish Bill," Texas House Bill 1000, was the battle the GCCA had to win. The war would go on for another seven years or so and there would be other crucial GCCA-led victories-notably the federal shutdown of purseseining for red drum breeding stock in the open Gulf in 1987, and the removal of all nets from Texas waters in 1988-but the Redfish Bill was its Gettysburg.