The Tchefuncte River has left many an angler scratching his head, but it actually offers surprisingly good springtime spawning action.
My first experience fishing the Tchefuncte River in St. Tammany Parish was the trolling motor going out on my brand-new Bass Tracker TX-17. I had waited for a boat like this all my life, and now here I was standing on the front deck wondering what to do.I never took shop class, and I never really paid attention while I was holding the flashlight for my dad, so my figuring out what was wrong with my trolling motor was about as likely as me winning that tournament.
About that time, a fellow in a small, red Nitro bass boat appeared around the corner. I just barely knew him because this was my first tournament fishing with Three Rivers Bassmasters back in 1991.
“Hey! I need some help!” I hollered across the water.
“What’s wrong,” he shot back.
“I don’t know what to do,” I replied.
“Welcome to the Tchefuncte River,” he retorted. “This is one tough place to fish.”
After informing him that it wasn’t the fishing that had me lost, although I had no fish in my Tracker, he trolled up next to me and started poking around and pulling on this wire and that.
“Grab me a spare fuse,” he instructed.
Of course I had none. Turns out you can make a mighty fine replacement fuse out of the pull-tab on a soda can (although this is not recommended).
That’s the way it is on the Tchefuncte River. I would learn over the next few years that catching bass in this confused river is much like making a fuse out of a pop-top. Although it may feel like fishing the Dead Sea at times, there are things you can pull out of your behind that put bass in the boat.
According to Covington bass pro Jason Pittman, the reputation of the Tchefuncte as being a tough place to fish might be deserved based on the way it treats anglers, but he says this reputation isn’t really reflective of what’s actually in the river.
“There’s a pile of fish in it,” Pittman insisted. “It’s nothing to go out, especially with the water warming up, and catch 20 to 40 fish. But what’s frustrating about that is five, maybe eight or 10 on a good day, would be tournament-grade fish over 12 inches.”
But Pittman said the Tchefuncte being somewhat stingy on size is only half of what frustrates so many anglers. Another confounding curveball it can throw is that you’re likely to catch five fish that weigh 10 pounds on Monday and go back on Tuesday and catch five that weight 5 pounds.
“It’s a hidden gem on the North Shore,” Pittman said, “but it’s also a frustrating place to fish. But if you’ll stick with it and adapt to everything it throws at you, you’ll find that it’s a great place to fish. Plus, it will make you a better bass angler in the long run because it keeps you thinking.”
Many anglers might not think about fishing the Tchefuncte River until later in the spring and into early summer, but Pittman says it sets up beautifully for some good springtime spawn bass fishing. The fronts can throw them off a little bit every now and then, but there is a lot of shallow cover that bedding bass find to their liking.
“There are a lot of different canals that bass can get in,” Pittman said. “Some of the banks may have shell. Maybe somebody poured some sand around the back side of their dock. Maybe it’s just a limb or a root. The point is that bass are on this shallow cover this time of year, and you can basically pick them off as you want if you’re willing to fish a lot of cover.”
Like most anglers who frequently fish the Tchefuncte River, Pittman breaks the water down into three sections — upper, middle and lower. Each section is distinctly different, and each can give up a bass or two to those who know their secrets.
Upriver
The section of the Tchefuncte immediately above I-12 is where three rivers — Little Tchefuncte, Abita and Bogue Falaya — all come together to form the larger Tchefuncte River. Fishing this section is more like fishing a river than the other two sections, and the most productive techniques are those that would work well in just about any river.
Depending on the water temperature, this section of the river can be one of the best to fish during March. Pittman pointed out that if the water gets into the 60s, which it usually does some time in March, anything that can trigger reaction strike from a bass is likely to get hammered.
“A buzz bait is probably the most underrated lure on the entire system,” Pittman said. “If you throw it all day, your chances of catching a bigger fish go up. But you can also try baits like a Chug Bug and a square-billed crankbait. A lot of the fishing up here is based on the laydowns in the three different rivers.”
Pittman went on to say that the main key to catching fish in the upper part of the river is to beat the cover from all different kinds of angles because you never know exactly where bass will be positioned on the cover. Some anglers like to fish each laydown from the outside edges in toward the trunk, and some like to immediately attack the heart of the cover first.
“One thing to keep in mind this year is all the development going on at the rest area,” Pittman said. “They took away the grass and trees, and when it rains, the run-off comes into the river and muddies it up right there by the bridge where the Little Tchefuncte drains in and meets the Bogue Falaya — just something to keep in mind after a rain.”
Middle
The middle section of the river is the section between I-12 and Brady’s Island. Although it looks very much like a river, this section actually fishes more like an old oxbow lake with current than it does a free-flowing river.
In a river that offers something for everybody, the middle section is where many anglers fish just because there is so much different stuff to fish here. According to Pittman, anglers could just as easily catch bass pitching plastic to a cypress tree as they are pulling a deep-diving crankbait over deep structure.
“There are a few oxbows in the middle section,” Pittman said, “not many, but some. Some are lined with cypress trees, and you can get a flipping bite in there with a Brush Hog or just about any other kind of plastic. And if they don’t eat the plastic on the trees, you can sometimes throw a spinnerbait.”
Pittman also pointed out that this section of the Tchefuncte has some river ledges that don’t get fished that much, as they require a little more effort to find and fish. He says the key is to watch your graph while making the turn in the river bend. Being that it’s a natural river, the outside bends are deeper and the insides are a little shallower.
“That shallow point on the inside may run farther out into the river than what you expect,” Pittman explained. “These are the kinds of spots that are very easy to pass up unless you’re actually looking for them. When you find a good point running out into the river, you can take a crankbait, jig or big worm and have a ball on it catching quality fish.”
Lower
Typically thought of as the Madisonville stretch of the Tchefuncte, the lower section of the river fishes a lot more like marsh than it does a river. And in this section, numbers, not size, is the name of the game. This is where to fish if you just want to get bit.
Anybody who regularly fishes the Tchefuncte knows that this is also the section that leads to the legendary rice fields. In fact, it is the rice fields that attract veteran anglers so far south.
“Although there are a lot of small fish in the rice fields, it’s also a place that many experienced anglers migrate to when the fishing is tough on the main river,” said Pittman. “They know that the back end of the rice fields stays clean, and with the sun on it, it heats up a little quicker than the main river.”
This concentration of fish — bass, redfish, sac-a-lait and speckled trout when they are in there — is the place to go if you just want to get your string stretched. All it really takes to catch fish back here is to tie on a small spinnerbait and get to fishing.
No matter which section you fish, though, try to develop the mentality that you’re going to have to move around a bunch to put together a decent limit of bass. In fact, Pittman said that if he hadn’t fished the river for about a week or two, he would burn a lot of gas from getting up and down on plane and running here and there.
“It can get confusing because you just don’t know if you should stop here or stop there,” he said. “So you end up stopping everywhere. But that’s OK because the more water you cover on the Tchefuncte, the better off you’ll be.”
Follow the author’s blog at www.chrisginn.com.
