Twelve of the last 15 days have produced 100-trout limits for Captain Chad Dufrene (985-637-6357) and his customers, and the only reason he missed on the other days was bad weather and wind. He’s been finished by 10 a.m. most of those days but that’s only because it’s taking him longer to find the trout than catch them.
“The trout are biting fast once you find them,” said Dufrene. “Take this past Saturday for instance. We started out with a few fish here and a few fish there, and we had about 20 trout in the boat. Then we pulled up to one spot and caught our last 80 in about 40 minutes. We only had two throwbacks, too. Most of our trout right now have been from 13 to 20 inches… all good eating sized fish.”
Some of Dufrene’s best spots the last couple of weeks have been out in Timbalier Bay, Lake Felicity, Lake Barre and Lake Raccourci. He’s fishing all the major islands in these areas, but he pointed out that the Tank Batteries in Timbalier Bay and Lake Raccourci have been the hottest spots to be.
“The trout we’re catching are chasing big shrimp,” Dufrene continued. “And when the fish are eating shrimp I love throwing glow and smoke colored plastic as long as the water is clear. I mean, they got a white shrimp and a brown shrimp. It really doesn’t matter what kind of plastic you throw as long as you got the right color.”
When the plastic bite slows down, Dufrene simply pulls off his artificial bait and puts on a live one. More specifically, he hooks a live bait on the same jighead he uses for his plastics and goes to work. Since shrimp and croakers are hard to find in Golden Meadow, Dufrene treads a cocahoe minnow on his hook.
To find his trout, Dufrene has been trolling around the Tank Batteries to figure out what corner the fish are holding on. He’s been fishing them enough to know which corner to start on, but sometimes he finds them on a different corner depending on what the tide is doing.
“The tide will reposition them on those structures,” Dufrene explained. “A lot of times, they’ll be on one corner on an incoming tide and a different one on an outgoing tide. If there aren’t a lot of boats out there, I start on my favorite corner and work around them from there. It really doesn’t matter what the tide is doing as long as it’s moving.”
