This month, it’s all in where you go and what you know.
Miserable March! I call it the bipolar month, the manic-depressive month and the month that just can’t make up its mind. March can’t seem to decide if it wants to be spring or winter, so it teases us with a little of both. It deceives us into thinking its spring, with southerly winds and a week of almost balmy weather. Flowers bloom, bees buzz, gardens grow and fish bite, and we all rejoice in the return of spring. Then Miserable March gets moody and throws an icy winter blast through once again.
Our temperatures jump up and down like a roller coaster, keeping fish scattered and confused. No wonder March is considered by many anglers to be the hardest of the year to fish.
Wise March anglers recognize the nature of the month, and plan their trips accordingly. One good plan is to consider taking along a pound or two of market shrimp, and if the speckled trout action is slow, soak some dead bait where you can attract sheepshead, drum and redfish. Add a few trout, and you put together a nice mixed box of fish, which is much better than what can often be a long, slow day of tedious casting and retrieving or popping a cork trying to find elusive trout.
That’s what is so frustrating about Miserable March. You can even get what seems to be a picture perfect day of sunny skies and gentle breezes; you think you’ll have a banner day reeling in trout after trout, only to be let down in devastating fashion and find that trout are scarcer than good-paying jobs.
I called Capt. Frank Moore (504-887-4960) down in Shell Beach, who has the uncanny ability to salvage what would otherwise be a lousy day and make something out of nothing. I knew if trout were not to be found, Moore could put me onto something that would bend my rod and stretch my line, and he kindly allowed me to jump aboard with Steve Uffman and Mark Munson for a trip. Uffman is an old friend of his from Baton Rouge, and Munson is an understudy who is chartering some trips for Moore. He brought some youth to the trip, and would be our deckhand for the day.
Moore’s boat was in the shop awaiting a new lower unit after he struck a submerged object out around the Stone Islane rocks, so he used his brother’s new 24-foot Triton for the trip. Moore must have thought he was behind the wheel of a sports car, wheeling and turning and accelerating around corners, but we managed to arrive at our destination in one piece.
Moore knew I wanted to catch a mixed box of fish that day, but he wanted to see if we could jump on some trout first thing in the morning. He’d been on a fairly good bite over on the Delacroix Island side, so that’s where we started, and that’s where we stayed.
We went straight to Skippy Lake, and from there Moore planned to drift Pointe Fienne and Bay Jack, and if that didn’t pay off, he said we’d head up to Lake Batola.
“All of these spots should be productive in March, depending on the fronts and the Caernarvon Diversion,” he said. “If the diversion is wide open, it pours all that cold, muddy river water through the marsh and displaces the trout. So a lot depends on the diversion. Then you have to contend with the fronts, because we usually are still getting some cold fronts blowing down this month, and that keeps the fish scattered and can shut down the bite.
“And we sometimes get those strong west winds that push the water out of the marsh, and that leaves us with low-water conditions to contend with, so it can be a challenge to find fish in March, and it’s a challenge to find fish consistently because they scatter and move from one day to the next.”
Moore says to optimize your chances for success, try to fish on the days when the conditions are most favorable. His advice: Fish between the fronts, when the temperatures have stabilized to some degree. Run out to these intermediate areas, the bays and lakes near to the coast where trout are transitioning from the deep interior to the outside waters. Look for clean water, and water with a decent current. Drift, don’t anchor.
“If you can pick your days, you’ll definitely have a better chance of finding fish,” he said.
We started our first drift in the back of Skippy Lake, where Moore caught some trout the day before. The wind was at our back, and we’d cast ahead of the boat so we could cast with the wind instead of against it. Moore watched the depth sounder, and started our drift in 3 feet of water. We fished about 2 feet under a popping cork.
“On days like this, I don’t waste time fishing deeper water because these fish will be shallow because the weather has been mild,” he said.
The initial action was slow, and Moore, in typical charter captain fashion, said, “Let’s make a move.”
That was a sentence we’d hear often through the course of the day.
We managed to pick up a few trout in Skippy Lake, but after several drifts and no real productivity, he motored us over to Pointe Fienne.
“That’s how it is this time of year,” he said. “Yesterday we limited out in Skippy Lake. Today we couldn’t hardly get a bite in the same spots. The fish are scattered and continually moving right now because there are no shrimp in the water to keep them in one area.”
But in Pointe Fienne, we found trout. Not all ganged up in one spot, but as we drifted a section of the bay, we’d catch eight or 10 fish, and then the action would peter out. Moore would crank up the outboard, go back to where we started and re-drift the same area, and once again we’d pick up eight or 10 trout.
Several times he’d push the Power Pole button to anchor us and try to stay on the action awhile, but each time we stopped drifting, the fish stopped biting. It was like flipping a switch. And as soon as we started drifting again, the bite resumed.
“This is how it is right now. Sometimes you can stick the Cajun anchor and stay on the action awhile, but usually when you put the anchor down, you put a hex on the action and it dies,” Moore said. “So keep drifting and re-drifting the same area until the action stops, and then move elsewhere and drift until you get on a bite again.”
We drifted that same area half a dozen times until it became unproductive, and Moore said, “Let’s make a move.”
We never moved very far, but each time he looked for clean water and good current, and I noticed he rarely drifted very close to the shoreline. Usually the bank was farther than you could cast. I also noted that he tried to position the boat in passes or places where the bay narrowed. Such places generally have more current flowing through and, that produces something of a funnel effect that forces bait into a flow where predators lurk, hunting for an easy meal.
Over the course of the day, we tried several different baits in numerous colors. I tried tightlining plastics, and couldn’t get a bump. I’d switch colors and try again with the same result. The rest of the crew fished under a cork and got all the hits, so I went to a cork rig as well to try to get into some action.
We fished DOAs, purple Cocahoes and beetles in several colors, all of which were mostly ignored by the trout. The one bait that caught the vast majority of our fish was a chartreuse curl-tail Gulp! Why the fish ate it up and turned up their noses at the rest, I can’t figure. I even tried other chartreuse plastics, and got ignored. It’s certainly not that the Gulp! is natural and life-like, because I know of nothing in the water that’s neon green in color. But on that day, it was the bait.
Strange creatures, these fish are. I’ve been in other situations when the magic color was glow or purple, and once if you didn’t throw pink you didn’t catch fish. But these situations are exceptions to the rule because the fish generally are just not that finicky. When they’re hungry, they’ll eat anything that doesn’t try to eat them, no matter what color or size or shape. So I gave up on everything else, and went with the fluorescent chartreuse curl-tail Gulp! and finally started catching some trout.
After a few more drifts in Pointe Fienne, Moore moved us over into Bay Jack Nevette, where we immediately got on a good bite. We’d have two or three hook-ups at a time, and it was just too much temptation for Moore. He’d push the button, and the Power Pole would stick us to the bottom, and the action would turn off instantly.
Every time, we’d resume the drift, and the bite would resume. Like I said, strange things, these fish are.
By this time, our box was getting close to the limits, and the wind was beginning to howl. We had to throw out a drift sock to slow our drift, and it did the job, enabling us to keep fishing until trout No. 100 went in the box.
On the way back to the dock, I reminded Moore that I was trying to do a feature story on catching a mixed box of fish for the March issue. But except for one poor sheepshead that lost his way in Skippy Lake, all we had to show for our efforts was a box full of speckled trout.
“Well Rusty, you know how it is,” Moore said with a wink. “Sometimes those fish just don’t cooperate, and you have to take what the water gives you.”
Capt. Frank Moore can be reached at (504) 887-4960.
