One of the most iconic opening lines from all of world literature comes from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The British author was comparing and contrasting life in London and Paris, but he might as well have been discussing inshore fishing during the month of December in south Louisiana. This is either the best month of the year, or the absolute worst, and sometimes it’s both. It all depends on the weather.

December is the most bipolar of the months. It can’t decide if it wants to be the most docile of falls or harshest of winters. Many years, local residents wear shorts to Christmas gatherings. Other Decembers are legendarily bitter. Take 1989, for instance. An Arctic blast steamrolled the area that year on Dec. 22, bringing snow and freezing local lakes and bays. Baton Rouge didn’t get above freezing for three days, and recorded a low temperature of 8 degrees F on Dec. 23.

Not exactly prime conditions for throwing soft-plastic baits over grass flats. Fortunately, events like that are the exception, but still, December is an enigmatic month, and local anglers can use its ebbs and flows to follow the fish.

Although the extremes can occur, the more general pattern is for cold fronts to push through once every five days or so, with nighttime lows kissing freezing on the second night after the front. For a day or two, winds will be out of the north, barometric pressure will rise and cold-blooded speckled trout will have the mental capacity of a can of spray cheese. Their brains just don’t work properly in cold conditions, and their bodies barely obey their brains, anyway. They’re like the iguanas in South Florida that fall from trees during cold snaps.

In these conditions, the fish stack up in deep-water thermoclines, and if the water there is warm enough, and you get a bait directly in front of their noses, you might get a bite every single cast. But many times, even if you stumble on a massive school, they’ll be physically incapable of biting a bait. That lasts for two or three days following the front, and then winds gain a southerly component, bringing air up from the warmer Gulf and driving daytime highs into the 60s and sometimes 70s. That’s when fishing can get really fun.

As soon as waters start to warm, the fish get frisky. Nature has taught them they have a limited window to get something in their bellies before the next front once again turns them into blithering idiots. Although deep thermoclines held the warmest of the water during the harshest of the cold, that’s no longer true. Flats exposed to the warming air, particularly on sunny days, heat up quickly, and the fish fan out over them searching for bait, mostly glass minnows and remaining white shrimp.

Fish in this mode are more aggressive and far less school-oriented, so the best way to target them is to repeatedly drift productive flats, throwing jerkbaits , soft-plastic paddletails on light jigheads, and shrimp-imitations under popping corks. And actually, if the warming trend is a little longer in duration and water temps on the flats reach the 60s, topwaters can become more productive than any other style of lure, particularly for big speckled trout.

That’s especially true on flats that feature scattered grass, pretty water and even just a few jumping mullet. It’s one of the most consistent patterns of the year, and is the main reason December rates so highly among hardcore anglers who ignore the hunting seasons to focus on the fish. For them, it’s mostly just the best of times.

The post Gulf Coast Wintertime Fishing appeared first on Sport Fishing Mag.

The word ‘relief’ has multiple definitions that seemingly have nothing to do with each other, and the most peculiar is “a difference in height from the surrounding terrain.” South Louisiana has no such relief. It’s as flat as Bangladesh, with the only difference in geographical height being the human-made levees that parallel the Mississippi River on either side, preventing it from spilling over its banks during spring floods, inundating homes and bankrupting insurance companies.

Saltwater Creeps Up the Mississippi to New Orleans

Because the region is so flat, the water in the Mississippi doesn’t actually fall into the Gulf of Mexico. It must be pushed with force from water upstream that is in fact impacted by the forces of gravity. But autumn is typically dry across much of the continent, and that means there ain’t a whole lot of water reaching the river — at least in relative terms — and most years, it’s not enough to hold the Gulf at bay.

At the river’s Bird’s Foot Delta, green, salty water takes advantage of the weakness, shoving its way as far upriver as New Orleans, some years even threatening the potability of the city’s drinking water. With that salty surge comes fish that aren’t generally associated with rivers — redfish, flounder and a whole lot of speckled trout — and best of all, because the banks of the river are armored, turbidity is never a problem. The river and its passes stay pristine, with visibility typically measured in feet, even after big blows associated with autumn cold fronts.

The river typically begins its annual descent some time in the summer, and by September, is below the 5-foot mark at New Orleans’ Carrollton gauge. That allows the passes and the river itself downstream of the Plaquemines Parish town of Buras to absolutely load up with redfish that move in to feast on estuarine bait stocks that spent most of the year growing in the nutrient-rich water, completely shielded from such predators.

Flounder also take root at points, drains and along edge walls in numbers that frequently defy belief. The species is typically an incidental catch for South Louisiana anglers, but in the autumn months at the mouth of the river, they are often targeted.

Louisiana Speckled Trout Fishing in Fall

In September and most of October, reds and flounder are the stars of the show, but annually in low river years, speckled trout join them right around the time kids are picking out their Halloween costumes. The specks set up along deep ledge walls in high-current areas, and ignore their bursting bellies to stuff their faces without ceasing. Though the techniques for targeting them can be unique, they’re the easiest fish in the world to get to bite.

Regular anglers often cast double-rigged 3/8-ounce jigheads teamed with soft-plastic paddle tails, sometimes having to level up to 1/2-ounce heads when currents are particularly swift. Double hookups are common, and the fish are often the biggest specks anglers will catch all year, measuring 25 inches and weighing up to 5 pounds.

A Hot Seatrout Bite in the Mississippi River

Last November, fishing buddy Justin Bowles and I hit a ledge in the river itself near the popular port of Venice, and found action that could not possibly have been better. We cast downcurrent, and worked our baits up a ledge that clearly held a school of specks that numbered in the hundreds if not thousands.

I went with the double-rig setup, while Bowles opted for a drop-shot rig anchored by a 1-ounce bell sinker. As soon as our baits reached bottom, bites were almost instantaneous. We were, at most, five minutes from Venice, and it remained in our view the entire trip. The water beneath our feet was green, clean and pristine. In the autumn war between Gulf and river, the Gulf had clearly won every battle.

The post Louisiana’s Fall Fishing Bite appeared first on Sport Fishing Mag.

Ancient Greeks believed the sun god Helios, offspring of Hyperion and Theia, crossed the heavens every day in a burning chariot. With our modern sensibilities, we snicker and guffaw at our simple-minded forebears for ascribing deity status to a sky-crossing orb of flame. Oh, the naivety!

Actually, a significant cohort exists among south Louisiana anglers who rival the early Grecians in their love, worship and adoration for the almighty Helios. These are the guys who push their boats and motors to the absolute limits to access glorified mud puddles deep in the Louisiana marsh, places that seem inaccessible and entirely too shallow to support any fish bigger than a bluegill.

But somehow, these backwaters — colloquially referred to as “duck ponds” — are exactly where thick-bodied redfish want to be, engaging in a Sisyphean quest to fill their bottomless bellies. The duck ponds are an all-you-can-eat buffet of crabs, shrimp, killifish and finger mullet, and the reds push into them in numbers from one to hundreds and absolutely terrorize the local baitfish population.

Sight Fishing for Louisiana’s Redfish

In these backwater ponds, which are often filtered by submerged aquatic vegetation, water clarity can range from gin-clear to tannic, and the redfish in them glow like stop signs — but only when the sun’s out. In fact, under a cloudless sky, the fish are so easy to spot, shallow-water anglers won’t even make a blind cast. I mean, what’s the point? They’ll simply pole around in the really shallow stuff or use a trolling motor in water that’s deep enough for it, and scan the water through polarized sunglasses, searching for the fish. Baits dangle patiently at the ends of rods, eagerly awaiting the moment a fish is spotted and they can fulfill their purpose.

Accurate casts are absolutely critical, and placement depends entirely on the demeanor and angle of the fish. Generally, an angler wants to cast past the red at a trajectory that will allow the lure to be retrieved a couple feet ahead of the fish. On some days, it’s best to drop the lure when the fish first sees it, and on others, bites are triggered when the angler plays keep away with the lure. Bites are intense, as the clear water allows every aspect of the take to be witnessed — the charging at the bait, the flaring of the gills and the vanishing of the lure as it’s sucked, along with the water around it, into the gaping maw of a hungry redfish.

Then the fights are the ultimate in intensity. Hook a redfish in a deep bayou, and it will head immediately for the bottom, trying to pull you, your rod and your boat down with it. But in the shallows, that’s not an option, so the fish strips as much line as it can on its first run, and then circles the boat like a distance runner on an Olympic track. That’s especially true with fish that locals call “overs” — redfish that stretch beyond the 27-inch maximum size limit.

Oversize Redfish in the Marsh

Biologists say that’s right around the size that redfish mature sexually and get the urge to move out to the Gulf to spawn. But many are late-bloomers that seem stuck in perpetual adolescence and refuse to put on their big-boy pants. Sometimes fish up to 35 inches are encountered in the ponds.

Regardless of size, these shallow, clear-water fish are the prettiest seen anywhere. Like chameleons, their skin changes color to suit their environment. Deep-water or dirty-water reds will be silver in color, with dark-bronze or brown backs, but in the shallows, the fish are bright orange, with the rich color often extending all the way around their normally white bellies.

This trait obviously gives them some camouflage advantage when targeting prey, but it completely betrays them when they themselves are the prey. Even Ray Charles could spot them. But only when the sun’s out. On cloudy days, the fish are nearly impossible to see, and lots of blind casts are necessary for success. It’s still fun and productive, but there’s nothing like casting to a fish you see and watching it suck in a lure. That’s why shallow-water redfish anglers are strict adherents to a religion, and Helios is their god.

The post Sight Fishing Louisiana’s Duck Ponds appeared first on Sport Fishing Mag.

Although Capt. Shane York is a regular at his local gym, at least a portion of his body-builder’s physique can be attributed to an annual run of bull redfish at an expansive bay near his favorite south Louisiana port. Every year in the late summer stretching through the fall, mature reds invade the flats in the lower Barataria Basin, and absolutely engorge themselves on bait stocks that must be seen to be believed. York is always there to greet them, armed with soft-plastic paddle tails under corks.

“You can throw whatever you want, and they’ll hit it, but that cork makes it pretty much a guarantee,” he said.

York has been kind enough to invite me to experience the bull-red blitz the last two seasons. Last year, we left predawn out of Myrtle Grove Marina, and caught them until neither of us could bear the thought of reeling in another fish. That was at 8 a.m. All the reds were pushing 40 inches.

“The smallest bull we’ve caught out here so far this year was 35 inches,” York said that morning.

Two years ago, I absolutely wrecked my biceps reeling in bull after bull, including my personal best, a 44-inch fish. Although mature redfish conduct their spawning duties in deep passes along the coast, that’s not where York finds the fish when they’re in feeding mode. He hunts for extensive flats of uniform 3- to 4-foot depths that hold bait, and when he finds one, success is almost assured, regardless of water clarity.

“We catch them out here in absolute chocolate milk,” he said.

The run coincides with the migration of white shrimp leaving Louisiana’s marshes this time of year. York releases every bull he catches, but if you were to cut open one’s belly, it would be jammed full.

Bull Red Drum Eat Speckled Trout

“You would find a lot of shrimp, but you’d also find some speckled trout,” he said. “They feast on those little speckled trout.”

In fact, the trout are such a significant part of the bull reds’ diet that York knows he’s in the right area when aggressive specks and white trout are the first to yank down his cork. Many of the specks are under Louisiana’s 13-inch minimum size limit, but some are solid keepers. York doesn’t mind putting those in the box if his clients want to take some fish home.

Often, diving seagulls give away the location of productive flats, so York said it pays to always be observant. He had just recently discovered the flat that produced so many fish for us last year.

“We were fishing one area, and we were moving to another area,” he said. “As we were driving across the flat, we saw two huge blowups right next to the boat. We stopped, put the Power-Pole down, made two casts and immediately doubled up.”

York’s favorite color lure is black with a chartreuse tail, but he also has success with white and straight chartreuse. He will be putting all those colors to use for the next few months. Once the fish show up in late July or early August, they stick around for a while.

“They’ll be out here really good through October or November, but you’ll still have some stretching into December,” he said.

By then, York will surely look even more ripped.

The post Louisiana’s Late Summer Redfish Blitz appeared first on Sport Fishing Mag.

Mississippi is just one of the 10 states touched by North America’s largest river, but somehow, it’s the one that inherited its name. Louisiana coastal anglers are fine with that because most have a love-hate relationship with “The Big Muddy.” In high-river years, when the Mississippi most lives up to its nickname, it shoves cubic foot after cubic foot of highly turbid fresh water into the marshes, bays and bayous of south Louisiana, giving inshore waters the clarity of an advanced lesson on quantum physics.

Estuarine species flee the scene, setting up shop in areas where they can actually see their fins in front of their faces. For anglers, that means longer runs burning more fuel and complete abandonment of familiar honey holes. Solicit an opinion from a south Louisiana angler about the Mississippi during a high-river spring, and you’ll likely get a string of expletives longer than Steve Martin’s in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.”

But as with all things in nature, there is a yang to the yin. Though the high water makes fishing tough in the short run, it infuses the ecosystem with more nutrients than a vitamin factory, spring-boarding it to glorious days of truly incomprehensible fishing productivity once the river retreats. Exactly when that happens depends entirely upon how much rain falls in the Midwest, but south Louisiana anglers usually start looking at the readings from New Orleans’ Carrollton gauge around the beginning of summer, and typically sometime in August, the river first retreats below 5 feet there. That’s the signal that the river has gotten so low and slow that it’s lost its battle against the Gulf, allowing clean, green water to infiltrate all the major passes and even the Mississippi itself south of Venice.

Speckled trout will eventually find their way to all the bait the river fed for months, but redfish, flounder and largemouth bass get first crack at the menhaden, glass minnows, killifish and crabs in August and September. It’s some of the best fishing found anywhere on the continent.

Charter captains who ferry inexperienced tourists use live or dead shrimp under corks to make harvest easiest, but veteran anglers who like a little more sport channel their inner Kevin VanDam and hit the passes like they’re out to win the Bassmaster Classic.

The roseau canes that line these waterways are hideouts for staggering numbers of bass, redfish, flounder and more, and when waters retreat, these fish get exposed. Venice regulars schedule their trips this time of year around falling tides, and hit major and minor passes that have steeper banks that allow game fish to wait for bait that gets sucked out of the canes.

In this scenario, a wide range of lures will work, but arguably the most productive and enjoyable technique is to flip soft-plastic worms, craws and creature baits to the edges of the canes. Bites are seldom ferocious, but the fights after hooksets sure are. It’s close-combat fishing, with anglers often getting splashed by angry redfish and bass erupting a rod’s length away.

Best gear includes heavy braided line, tungsten bullet weights of at least 3/8-ounce and 3/0 or 4/0 standard J hooks. Extra-wide-gap hooks tend to emerge from fish’s lips, snagging the tough roseau canes in the process. It’s not uncommon for anglers to watch helplessly as a violent bass, red or flounder earns its freedom due to a hook point that’s embedded in a cane.

Newcomers are often stunned to discover all three of these species cohabitate side by side by side, and when setting the hook, it’s impossible to know which type of fish will emerge through the surface. That always adds an exponent to the fun factor. There’s no telling exactly when the river will fall below 5 feet this year, but interested anglers can check the level and forecast depth. Whenever it is, fishing will be off the chain, and anglers will owe it all to the tough spring days when the water was dirty and the fish were far out.

The post Saltwater Flipping and Pitching appeared first on Sport Fishing Mag.

On a rising tide, the remaining brown shrimp and growing white shrimp that fuel the Louisiana marsh ecosystem are scattered throughout the skinny-water marsh ponds, enjoying the hours of relative peace and quiet that accompany high water levels. To be sure, some get picked off by marauding hordes of redfish that scavenge around every grass bed, searching for any living morsel that might provide an appetizer before the entree really arrives.

That happens when the tide turns. As water levels begin to fall, tides stack the hapless shrimp on the conveyor belt of death, dragging them from back waters to the bigger lakes and bays. Redfish know this, of course, so they camp out at marsh drains, and let the food come to them. This puts the fish in an aggressive, feeding frame of mind, and makes them particularly susceptible to lures you’d find in the tackle box of a guy hoping to win the Bassmaster Classic.

One of my favorites is a Bill Lewis Echo 1.75 crankbait, a lure that’s obnoxiously loud and has more action than a salsa dancer. That’s what I had tied on during a trip in July that began just three hours before the sun would cross the western horizon. I intentionally started late, partially to avoid the suffocating heat but mostly because that’s when the tide was falling. While working the shoreline of a large marsh lake, I came upon a drain that was dumping gorgeous water from a pond choked with hydrilla and coontail. It certainly looked like a place that might hold a feeding redfish or two.

Not all my casts are perfect, but this one was, landing just at the opening of the drain. I wouldn’t have to wait long to see if any feeding reds were there. I don’t think I got two full cranks on the reel before something clobbered the hard-plastic bait and I instinctively set the hook. The water erupted in a froth of copper-tinted foam as a 27-inch redfish became enraged at the baitfish that seemed to have otherworldly power. The fish thrashed its head back and forth, and in the process managed to dislodge the hooks from its gaping maw.

The lure flew through the air, reentering the water about 5 feet away. I was disappointed at having lost the fish but, as always, impressed by the power and tenacity of these trophic marsh dwellers. Then something crazy happened. Apparently super annoyed that its easy meal had gotten away without providing a little corner of contentment in its belly, the redfish charged at the bait and absolutely obliterated it while it was resting motionless on the surface. I again set the hook, and this time, the fish wouldn’t get so lucky. It would never again get to swim where it wanted without a yellow tag near its dorsal fin.

Would the ubiquitous soft-plastic paddletail have elicited the same reaction from this redfish? Who knows? But it’s not for novelty that my favorite redfish lures this time of year would work equally well on a cypress-peppered flat of an impoundment. Redfish just can’t seem to resist them.

In addition to the crankbaits, I also regularly throw a gold-bladed spinnerbait teamed with a ¹⁄₄-ounce jighead and soft-plastic paddletail as well as a ribbed worm fished Texas-rigged below a ¹⁄₄-ounce tungsten bullet weight. The crankbait is my go-to in waters devoid of submerged aquatic vegetation or where there’s a hard edge to the grass that the fish use as a shoreline. When the grass is scattered, I’m more likely to reach for the spinnerbait, and in areas with drop-offs and ledges, the worm is hard to beat.

All are proving particularly effective this year. After a few meager seasons, the spawn of 2021 was especially robust, and those fish are all now in the 18- to 22-inch range. The marshes are absolutely crawling with redfish.

The post Bass Fishing for Redfish appeared first on Sport Fishing Mag.

The ultimate goal of Elon Musk’s SpaceX is to one day establish a colony of humans on Mars, a planet 140 million miles away. Reaching the Chandeleur Islands is only slightly easier. Formed more than two millennia ago when the Mississippi River was dumping sediment into its St. Bernard lobe, the Chandeleur chain is a 60-mile stretch of sand, shell, mangrove and dune grasses. It more resembles an unexplored moonscape than a popular fishing destination.

That’s partly because the area was included in the Breton Island Reservation by President Theodore Roosevelt more than a century ago, and development of any kind — even primitive camping — is illegal there. But it’s also because the Chandeleur chain is so freaking far from absolutely anywhere. Though it’s part of Louisiana, the nearest ports are actually in Mississippi. Still, it’s a 30-mile run over open water from Gulfport.

Boats that can handle those big offshore swells may not be best for exploring the shallow-water grass flats that seem to go on forever behind the protection of the islands. That’s why for many anglers, the best way to fish the islands is to plunk down a wad of cash, hop aboard a mother ship and fan out over the flats on skiffs with tiller-controlled outboards. A number of outfits along the Mississippi coast offer the service.

A DIY Chandeleur Island Fishing Trip

Other anglers with more of a DIY mindset wait for days with perfect conditions, load up on fuel and roar across Breton Sound in their bay boats. That’s what outdoor television-show host Kevin Ford and I did with our good buddy Capt. Justin Bowles during a June trip not too long ago. We had a night reserved at the Chandeleur Islander, a jack-up barge that provides hot meals and bunks for visiting anglers, so our plan was to scout on day one while fishing from the boat, in hopes of locating an area to wade-fish the morning of day two.

Most fishing plans, of course, require some adjustment on the fly, but this one worked to pure perfection. We launched along the Mississippi coast, and after a ride out that was a little bumpier than ideal, we arrived at the Chandeleurs mid-morning. Even though all of us are jaded lifelong anglers, we still stood in marvel at the sight of gin-clear water over seagrass flats as far as the eye could see.

We employed a hit-and-run strategy, fishing for a few minutes in a number of different areas, looking for the right mix of water clarity, depth and bait. Though we caught tons of fish from the boat, it was mostly a scouting mission to locate an area that would give us a reasonable chance of success while wading the next morning.

Great Fishing at the Chandeleur Islands

Lucky for us, it was an embarrassment of riches, with almost too many options to choose from. We all agreed on what we figured would be the No. 1 spot, and then spent the waning minutes of the day catching speckled trout within sight of the Islander. The next morning started well before dawn with way too much breakfast and that nervous chatter that always precedes fishing trips in new areas. We loaded our gear, and with only a hint of twilight to the east, we scooted down to the area we had found the day before.

With Bowles’ bay boat securely anchored, we fanned out over the grass flat, while a constant cacophony of nesting-shorebird calls washed across the flat surface. Before I even made a cast, I knew this was going to be one of the best fishing trips of my life. Everywhere around us, speckled trout were crashing into schools of mullet, emitting that characteristic pop sound big trout make when they suck in bait, water and air.

The fish clearly couldn’t tell the difference between our topwater plugs and the real thing. The explosions were relentless, and we all caught speckled trout almost every cast for the next three hours. It was epic.

But really, for the Chandeleur chain, it was just ordinary. The area is so vast, unspoiled and underfished, trips there that rank as the best of your life are the rule rather than the exception. Plant your toes in the sand at the right spot, and you simply won’t be able to believe how many fish can crowd into one area. I’ll be back out there soon — assuming Uncle Elon doesn’t come through with that ticket to Mars.

The post Wade Fishing the Chandeleur Islands appeared first on Sport Fishing Mag.

The word “artificial” is inherently pejorative. If a food company includes artificial colors or flavors in a particular product, it’ll bury that fact in the list of ingredients. Highlighted on the front of the package will be something like “Packed With Vitamin C,” rather than “Now With More Artificial Flavor.”

That’s true for everything but fishing. Having success with “artificial” lures is viewed as affirmation of skills, and anglers across the fruited plain regularly entreat fisheries managers for more artificial reefs. Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) has responded to that demand in recent decades by dropping limestone, shell and even bridge rubble in select areas across the coast, and since the state provides easy-to-find coordinates on the LDWF site, the reefs are regularly visited by hopeful anglers.

Still, none is as regularly productive as the 15 miles of artificial reefs in eastern Lake Pontchartrain that were designed for transportation and commerce. Attracting fish is just a happy accident.

Louisiana’s Bridge Fishing

Interstate 10, Highway 11 and a train trestle all span a roughly 5-mile gap over Louisiana’s most famous coastal lake. Commuters and engineers see these bridges as a connection between the cities of New Orleans and Slidell, but to anglers, they are just really expensive fish-attractors.

Every year in the spring and fall, speckled trout and flounder join the redfish, sheepshead and black drum that spend all year hiding behind the bridge stanchions to ambush baitfish and shrimp being pushed by tides around the concrete. When the trout arrive, word spreads quickly among the south Louisiana fishing community, and hordes of marauding anglers descend on the bridges.

By far, the train trestle attracts the most attention. Its stanchions are far more tightly packed and are surrounded by scattered rip-rap. This combination attracts more fish than the other two bridges, and consequently, that attracts more anglers. On a calm weekend day in the spring or fall, a latecomer can find it almost impossible to shoehorn within casting distance of the bridge, since most anglers will be soaking live shrimp while on anchor.

As such, trestle diehards prefer to go on weekdays with marginal wind, when they can work stretches of the bridge with artificial lures. The most popular are 3 ¹⁄₂– to 4¹⁄₂-inch paddle tails fished on ³⁄₈– to ¹⁄₂-ounce jigheads. Standard protocol is to set up on the down-current side of the bridge, and cast as close to the stanchions as possible.

How to Fish Bridges

But, as frequently is the case in fishing, sometimes the rules don’t apply, and the fish are located far off the stanchions or on the upcurrent side. Trestle veterans test all possibilities before abandoning the bridge to try their luck at Highway 11, Interstate 10 or the nearby marsh.

Depths across the span of the bridge range from 8 to 16 feet, and contact with the bottom is almost always essential. Most successful anglers hop the lures back to the boat, allowing them to settle back to the bottom after each hop.

Bites are often subtle ticks that test anglers’ skill and the sensitivity of their equipment. That’s true even though the speckled trout that populate the bridges are consistently some of the largest available to Louisiana anglers. Though the trestle seldom delivers fish over 6 pounds, an average speck there is about 2 pounds.

As a general rule, fishing is best in the spring on a rising tide that’s bringing bait in from outside waters and in the autumn on a falling tide that is sucking white shrimp out of the backwaters. But great trips can still be had on opposite tides during the respective seasons. In the spring, the speck run lasts until about the middle of June, when mature fish move to the salty waters of the big bays and sounds to lay eggs and fertilize them. They typically return sometime in October.

Nearby launches are located in Slidell (Eden Isles and Bayou Liberty) and New Orleans (Rigolets, Lake Catherine and Irish Bayou). The eastern shoreline of Lake Pontchartrain provides reasonable protection on a wind with any east in it. Westerly winds are like kryptonite to the lake’s bridges, dirtying the water, shutting down fish and making for a bumpy, miserable experience. Fortunately, predominant winds in the spring and fall are out of the east, and good days at the bridges are far more common than bad ones.

The post Artificial Structure Attracts Spring Specks appeared first on Sport Fishing Mag.

During the winter months, mama croakers spew their eggs into high-salinity offshore waters, where they’re fertilized by daddy croakers, and then, in the afterglow, both mama and daddy head off to find something to eat, leaving the youngsters to fend for themselves. Maybe it’s parental malpractice, but Mother Nature shrugs. She couldn’t care less.

Along the Louisiana coast, the larval and post-larval croakers are pushed by the tides into shallow waters, where they use seagrasses and detritus to hide from predators and feast on rotifers, copepods and even the very detritus that serves as their home.

Eventually, though, the fish outgrow the marshes, and begin to migrate in the spring. That’s when they face a murderer’s row of speckled trout — and unwittingly provide anglers with some of the best fishing action of the year.

Croaker Chaos

For the growing croakers, big spring tides are both a blessing and a curse. Riding the conveyor belt of the tides is how juvenile croakers make their way into the bigger bays, but these strong currents also slam the fish into ledge walls that disorient them and make them easy prey for specks. This, in turn, makes the trout easy prey for anglers.

It happens every spring in South Louisiana, and is most consistent in brackish marshes, where juvenile croakers proliferate. Anglers who want to maximize their productivity simply ride around looking for what locals call “boiling water.” Boiling-water areas show upwellings on the surface, where hard currents hit ledge walls and are forced upward. These are most commonly found in winding bayous with 10 to 20 feet of depth. Not every ledge wall will hold fish, but a high percentage of them do, and an angler who hits enough of them will certainly find a bite that has him posting pictures on social media.

Best baits, far and away, are 3½-inch soft-plastic paddle tails that most accurately mimic the size and action of the migrating croakers. Louisiana anglers fish those on ⅜-ounce jigheads, and will sometimes add a ¼-ounce jighead-and-paddletail combo fished as a double rig when currents are particularly swift. Figuring out how fish orient at each ledge wall is part of the fun, and shrewd anglers will frequently change their angles to find feeding specks. Hooked fish regularly upchuck juvenile croakers onto the boat decks of successful anglers. Often these fish are so recently ingested, they can be thrown overboard, where they swim down, probably to be eaten by another trout.

Spring Seatrout Success

Depending on water temperature, the bite will begin around the first of March and stretch almost to the summer solstice. By then, most of the mature specks have moved offshore to spawn, leaving behind only the undersized immature fish, along with a host of pests, like hardheads and gafftops.

But during the run, the specks are shockingly large for Louisiana marsh fish. An 18-inch average is about the norm, and several fish in the schools will stretch between 20 and 24 inches. In comparison, anglers fishing marsh lakes and expansive bays during this same time of year will typically be plagued by undersized and barely legal fish.

Though specks are the primary beneficiaries of the croaker migration, other species also notice and take advantage of the easy meals. Redfish are ever present, and the pattern delivers far more bites from black drum, flounder and largemouth bass than unfamiliar anglers might expect. Given the onslaught, it defies belief that any croaker survives to reach offshore waters and complete the spawn cycle, but clearly a whole bunch do. Despite getting no help from their parents.

The post The Best Spring Seatrout Bait appeared first on Sport Fishing Mag.

I’m clearly a glutton for punishment. For most anglers, fishing trips involve making a milk run of spots that have delivered for them in the past, and hoping that at least one of them will hold feeding fish on that day. It’s an efficient strategy that certainly increases the chances for success. But to me, it’s as boring as reading a book on String Theory.

The joy for me in the sport of angling is not in reeling in a fish but rather in overcoming the challenge of figuring out the fish. Each bite is just confirmation that the fish were doing what my analysis determined they should be. Once the fish is hooked, I’d just as soon hand the rod to someone else to reel it in.

Because of that, I rarely fish the same spot twice, preferring to hit new areas that require me to read the water and make exploratory casts to determine if my hypotheses were correct. Since my home state of Louisiana has 2.5 million acres of coastal wetlands, the options are almost endless for anglers like me who want to channel their inner Vasco da Gama.

As such, most of my fishing trips actually begin at my desk staring at Google Earth on my Mac. I look for areas rich in hydrographic features that should deliver based on expected conditions on the day I’m fishing.

To me, one of the most predictable occurs during or immediately following an atmospheric feature that most south Louisiana anglers despise — a west wind. Breezes with a compass reading anywhere from about 225 to 315 cause water in Louisiana’s marshes to flee like tourists the day after Mardi Gras. Lakes, bays and lagoons that may have produced fish the day before a westerly wind will be as fishless and nearly as dry as the Mojave.

Since those are the areas that most anglers fish, west winds are as popular in south Louisiana as bland gumbo. But those fish have to go somewhere, and to me, a west wind merely serves to concentrate them and make them easier to catch. That’s particularly true with speckled trout and redfish, although the strategies I employ to find them differ slightly. 

If I’m hoping to get a speckled-trout fix, I scan the satellite images and make note of medium-sized bayous that drain marsh lakes or lagoons. From September through May, specks will stuff their faces in these water bodies. They will retreat to the nearest deep water when forced to by Mother Nature. Although major bayous with depths to 20 feet are certainly worth checking, the sweet spots for me are bayous with 6 to 10 feet of depth. Invariably, once on sight, I’ll make my first cast at the first bend of each of those bayous.

If I’m craving the hard hits and strong pulls of redfish, my game plan varies slightly. What I look for in my map study are small bayous that connect two marsh ponds. Redfish seem to always want to be as shallow as possible, often hunting for snacks in water no deeper than the height of their bodies. So when ponds get dry or too shallow to swim, the fish stack up in absurd numbers in these small bayous that measure only 2 to 3 feet deep.

Often the challenge is getting to these tiny waterways in the low-water conditions, an obstacle that’s overcome with the use of a mud motor or with nerves of steel while running an outboard over glorified mud puddles. The latter is the method I employ, so a push pole is standard gear on my boat. It’s saved me from spending the night in the marsh more times than my wife will ever know.

Admittedly, not every medium-sized bayou that drains a marsh lake will hold speckled trout, and not every small bayou between two ponds will be crowded with redfish. So I find several before I ever pull my boat out of the garage, and I’ll hit them all in a day’s fishing. Ground truthing my hypotheses is what makes this sport fun.

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