This large island offers endless opportunities to catch redfish in the heat of the summer.
We were making good time cutting through 2- to 3-foot seas in West Cote Blanche Bay, but on the horizon, as far as you could see out in the Gulf, was an ominous slate-blue sky, which meant only one thing: We were going to get wet — real wet — possibly before we reached our destination. Thinking to myself, this is madness, it still felt good to feel that rush you get when the consequences are unknown. Unlike Joshua Dugan and his running buddy Nick Bourgeois, each of whom is young enough to be my son, I thought I’d been down the road far enough to have gained some common sense.
But then again, when you’ve got your mind made up going to a place like Marsh Island to do some redfishing, well, you’re only young once; you might as well make the most of it.
As far back as Dugan can remember, he has been going to Marsh Island and its surrounding waters with his grandfather.
“My grandpaw was an avid fisherman,” Dugan said. “Every weekend — rain or shine — every Saturday he was out here. I was 2 or 3 years old. My grandmother would make sure I had some shorts and if I needed rinsing off, I’d just rinse off in the water. But I was in a boat at that age going to Marsh Island. I loved it, and I was raised doing it.”
Bourgeois also grew up fishing and hunting in the region. His family shares a camp his grandfather built on Cypremort Point; get-togethers there are still common today.
According to Dugan, when fishing Marsh Island you have to think of it as a whole region with surrounding waters and not just a fixed island.
“Over the years, a lot of people, when they say they are going to fish Marsh Island, they actually fish around the island too,” he said. “Besides the inner island itself, they’ll fish East Cote Blanche Bay around some of the platforms that are abandoned. They’ll fish directly south of Marsh Island in places like Diamond Reef — a lot of times it sticks up during the summer and you can actually see its diamond shape. There’s also Dry Reef that runs all the way from Cypremort Point to Southwest Pass.”
Geographically, Marsh Island is sort of a dividing line. To the east, the marshes that make up the Deltaic Plain are influenced by fresh water from the Mississippi and Atachafalaya rivers. Marshes in this half of Louisiana are soft sedimentary type. West of the dividing line is the Chenier Plain, which forms a higher and more stable terrain.
Because of the influence of the Atchafalaya River into the area, the water is brackish, and what most anglers look for — clarity — is often difficult to come by in the bays. Additionally, East and West Cote Blanche bays are susceptible to weather conditions, and a hard southerly flow of squalls and storms tend to stir them up.
“Most of the time when the water is dirty in the bay, you can almost bank the water is going to be clear and green inside Marsh Island,” Dugan said. “The water hasn’t been shook up inside the island. And sometimes it’s just the opposite outside the island. When the water is clear in the bays, it can be dirty inside Marsh Island.”
The lack of clear water, for the most part, keeps Dugan and Bourgeois tossing mostly dead shrimp either under popping corks or off the bottom attached to jigheads, depending on the locations they’re fishing.
Platforms are locations where attaching shrimp to 3/8- or ½-ounce jigheads and fishing it off the bottom is very effective. The tide also impacts the catch around these structures. Regardless if the tide is rising or falling, water moves through the legs of these manmade sanctuaries that fish hang around. When it’s moving is when it’s best to fish the rigs.
“The oil companies really helped us out by putting structure out here,” Dugan said. “The redfish spawn on the island and in the marshes surrounding the bays. And they have plenty of structure out in the bays to feed and stick around that gives them plenty of cover.”
There are plenty of wood and pipe structures, but many of them are concrete, which are reminiscent of what you’d find in places like Lake Pontchartrain, but on a much smaller scale.
When fishing the platforms in East Cote Blanche Bay on the eastern-most end and within sight of Marsh Island, anglers will also find they produce a mixed bag of fish. Though redfish may be the target species, croakers, blue catfish and sheepshead are typical bonus fish.
Because of the rough conditions in the bay on the hair-raising trip with Dugan and Bourgeois, we decided to fish the safety of the inside waters of the island entering at Bird Island Bayou, near the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries’ headquarters camp.
When fishing by trolling the vast exterior shallow shoreline of Marsh Island or the inner bayous, the popping cork rules the day. What’s more, there are a tremendous number of locations that hold redfish in and around the island such as rock erosion embankments that protect the shoreline, coves, grassy points, trenasses and little passes in the vegetation that drain ponds.
Dugan prefers to troll, find likely looking locations and anchor temporarily, where he and Bourgeois complete a patient systematic probing of the spot until it has been entirely covered with casts. More often than not, they entice reds to strike.
Though rat reds were plentiful, the anglers managed to tape legal 16-inch-and-above fish, tossing them in the ice chest for dinner later on.
One unexpected surprise was the plate-sized flounder that we caught along Bird Island Bayou.
Bourgeois said there are some nice flounder to catch.
“We catch some nice-sized flounder around Marsh Island — not like we used to years ago though,” he said. “I remember when we used to catch flounder as big as place mats. Those were some big fish. We don’t catch as many as we used to, and they aren’t that big anymore. But we still catch a few big ones.”
Other locations anglers will want to try and fish on the inside of the island are the manmade weirs. These drainages work like gates, opening and closing with the tide. Redfish know these locations as places to feed, and so do the anglers who pattern their fishing around the tidal fluctuations.
Everything fish like to eat flows out of the marsh through the weirs. Shrimp, baitfish, crabs, insects and other invertebrates make the weirs a place where fish have a literal smorgasbord of food sources to gorge upon.
It was along one of these weirs that I took refuge behind a sign that shielded me from the downpour of sideways rain that pelted us. My two young friends continued to fish with their backs to the rain like a couple of horses in a field that didn’t have a choice. This was the sort of Marsh Island madness that only youthful-minded fishing zealots would understand.
Dugan, who enjoys bringing friends and family to Marsh Island, has lived long enough in his 28 years to appreciate what it has to offer.
“I love being able to take my friends and go spend a day fishing this area,” he said. “There are not a lot of people in the United States who can go to a place like this and enjoy what we have. I mean, Arkansas is beautiful, but you take somebody from Arkansas and bring them on one of these trips, and they don’t have to catch many fish to have fun. There’s so much to see, so much to do.”
Anglers who prefer to troll and bang the banks with artificial lures will find the region isn’t unlike the marshes elsewhere, where baits like Rat-L-Traps, Johnson spoons and plastics on jigs all work well. Marsh Island does provide some spot-and-stalk opportunities along the shorelines, as reds chase baitfish in the shallows.
However, at the end of the day, you can’t improve much over the catches made from good-old dead shrimp suspended tactically the way Dugan and Bourgeois fish.
“I was saying to my wife Brittany, if I could have the one job of my dreams, I’d buy me a little house in Jamaica, Grand Cayman or some place like that and be a fishing guide,” Dugan said. “I’d even bait the hooks. I could do that all week, everyday, even in the heat. That would be my dream job.”
For now, Dugan will have to settle for Marsh Island and just maybe a little of the madness that goes with it on those rainy
days.
