Let Mother Nature tell you where to target specks and reds this month.
The word coming out of the Barataria Basin, according to Captain Mike Daigle with Cast-It-Charters (504-915-9480), is that the trout are on the move. Daigle went from catching limits every day last week to barely scraping out some keepers this week. During the transition, he’s concentrating on slamming the reds.
“Last Monday through Thursday, we were limiting every day (on trout) around Four Bayou Pass,” Daigle said. “It started slowing down on Friday of last week, and it’s been a struggle ever since. Catching fish isn’t that much of a problem, though. It’s catching the keepers that’s tough.”
Where the trout are any given day is anybody’s guess. However, Daigle said he expects them to show up soon in the typical places like The Pen, Salvador, Bayou Rigolets and Little Lake. In fact, the move could be really quick if it’s anything like last year.
“The trout moved from Lafitte to Salvador in one day last year,” Daigle said. “So if you start looking for them around the same old fall places, you could get in them quicker than you realize.”
In the meantime, one of the best tactics might be to look for the birds working. Daigle said catching fish under the birds isn’t tough, but as an example of what to expect, he said anglers fishing the birds might catch 12 keepers for every 100 trout.
Other than the fantastic bite slowing down lower in the Barataria system, Daigle said another way he knows the trout are on the move is that his fish-finder screen is thick with fish as he goes down the bayous.
“They’re stacked top to bottom on the screen,” he said. “I know not all that is trout, but you’ve got to expect that a bunch of them are. If you can get in a little patch of fish, try throwing a glow/chartreuse bait under a popping cork. We’ve also caught some tightlining a purple/chartreuse Gene Larew High Tide.”
While he’s waiting on the trout to settle into their fall hotspots, Daigle is fishing the redfish in Bay L’Ours and Little Lake. Wind has been a factor, though, and the bite hasn’t been one of those “slam-dunk” bites that redfish are known for.
“They’re taking the bait kind of soft right, now kind of like a winter bite,” Daigle said. “I guess the water is still so hot that it’s keeping them kind of sluggish. There’s been a lot of short-hitting, too. We’re getting a lot of our baits back with just the tails bitten off.”
Even with the soft bites and sluggish fish, Daigle has still had a lot of success fishing them with a purple/chartreuse curl-tail Gene Larew High Tides. Little Lake has been best when there is no east wind, but a blow from the east will shut that down in a hurry. Try the rocks in Bay L’Ours and the west shore of Little Lake.