Larry Leschper, the author’s brother, caught this 28-inch speckled trout from the Land Cut south of Corpus Christi. Photo by Lee Leschper

Almost 40 years ago, my Mom and Dad gave me a gift that keeps giving to this day: They took the family for a long weekend visit to Rockport, borrowing a friend’s bay house -- more like a shack, really.

The first morning, we fished an old Aransas Bay pier. A then-legal 14-inch redfish inhaled a dead shrimp my mom was floating under a popping cork and changed our lives. Compared to the channel cats and sunfish we’d caught in the past, this seemed like big game! And thus began my love affair with Rockport and the Middle Texas Coast.

Mom and Dad bought that little fishing shack, and we spent the next decade wading the flats of Aransas and Copano bays surrounding Rockport and Fulton. To this day, those remain among my family’s most cherished memories, and the Middle Coast remains among our favorite places on earth.

And forget about the good old days! The fishing is far better today than it was 40 years ago.

Today, regardless of whether an angler is planning his first visit to salt water or is already an Old Salt, it’s hard to find a more productive place on earth than those bay systems. Both north and south of the “Toast of the Coast” stretch hundreds of square miles of clear, shallow bays and flats from a few inches to a few feet deep -- all rich in habitat for forage and game fish, including trout and reds.

Today the focus has also changed for bay anglers -- from quantity to quality. In the 1970s, we never thought about catching trout and reds as anything more than a fun way to fill a cooler, freezer and frying pan. Our focus was to catch and keep as many as possible, usually school trout and forearm-length reds. We keyed on reefs, wells and piers where the younger fish gathered. A good day was a 100-trout-in-the-cooler. We seldom caught a fish over 16 inches.

In those days, they were still commercial fish, and commercial fishermen were using gillnets and trotlines to harvest them by the truckload. That all changed with the help of far-thinking groups like the Gulf Coast Conservation Association, which got trout and reds reclassified as game fish and lobbied the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to impose the first meaningful size and bag limits.

Then Mother Nature raised the ante: Freezes in the winters of 1983 and 1986 killed millions of game fish along the coast, creating the right atmosphere of concern for tighter regulations, including 10-fish limits, and a 15-inch minimum size limit for trout, and slot limits for redfish.

The next step, hatchery production and stocking of fry, especially redfish fry, really took Middle Coast fishing from being in real jeopardy to being good, even great. Once small pods or individual reds had been the norm, but management made it possible to fish vast schools of the bronze beauties sometimes.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

While the number of anglers on the Texas Coast has increased, Mother Nature has, aided by the wildly successful stocking program, refilled the flats and bays with tremendous populations of both trout and reds.

Enough history. If you’re heading to the Middle Coast this summer, here are some favorite spots and tips, based on half a lifetime of happy fishing memories.