This article from the Houston Chronicle was sent to me by Randy(308).

Mystery and surprise play big roles in fishing's attraction.
We never really know what's out there under the water — what's going to grab a bait or lure, or when.
We can have a good idea.
But sometimes the fish on the other end of the line turns out to be anything but expected. They can be enigmas.
One of those mysteries manifested itself recently along the middle coast.
My friend Will Leschper and a couple of his friends were wade-fishing around Traylor Island, which sits on the boundary between Aransas and Redfish bays near Rockport. They were throwing lures and pecking away at speckled trout when one of the anglers, Ron Coulston, stuck a fish that wasn't a trout.
The fish was a brute, peeling line from Coulston's reel like a bull redfish or maybe a shark.
It proved to be none of those; it was something totally unexpected and out of place in a Texas bay.
It was a ling. A 42-inch ling.
Ling — cobia or lemonfish — are a pelagic species, a fish of the open Gulf of Mexico. Occasionally, anglers fishing beach-front piers or jetties will catch a stray ling. But ling are rare in Texas bays.
What was a ling doing in Aransas Bay?
Over the past 30 years, I've heard of several instances of fish showing up in waters they're not supposed to inhabit and even personally encountered a couple.
Aquatic surprises
• A handful of anglers fishing the Trinity River immediately below the Lake Livingston dam have reported catching southern flounder, a marine fish.
To get to the Livingston Dam, those saltwater flounder have to swim over 100 miles upstream in freshwater — something they are not supposed to be able to do.
Also, a handful of sharks — almost all of them bull sharks, a species with a pretty high tolerance of freshwater — have been taken in the Trinity River near the Livingston Dam.
And I've had a personal experience with an unexpected saltwater fish in the Trinity. Fishing for crappie and bass in the lower Trinity River near Liberty several Octobers ago, I caught a small tarpon. A fisheries biologist verified it.
• In the wake of Hurricane Alicia in August 1983, an angler fishing in Galveston Bay near the Galveston Ship Channel hooked and landed a sailfish, a species almost never seen within 40 miles of the Texas coast.
The great escape
• In the early 1980s, an angler fishing for speckled trout and redfish along the Galveston Jetties landed a large striped bass.
Texas bays may once have held a modest striped bass population, although evidence supporting that contention is debatable. The state recently started a stocking program aimed at establishing a population of stripers, anadromous fish that live most of their lives in saltwater but spawn in freshwater rivers, in bays along the upper coast.
The capture of the 20-pound-class striped bass on the Galveston Jetties was amazing enough, as no striped bass had been caught in the bay in decades.
But there was something else about this fish. It was tagged.
The tag, with its identifying number, revealed the fish's history.
The striper had been tagged and released in Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Texas/Louisiana border.
The fish had escaped the reservoir by going over the dam and into the Sabine River.
Following its instincts, the striper traveled down the Sabine River, into the Sabine Lake bay system, through Sabine Pass into the Gulf and down the coast to the Galveston Jetties.
If not for the tag it wore, the striper would have been another unexplained angling aberration — like a 42-inch ling on the Traylor Island flats.