If a buddy goes to this August hotspot and tells you he didn’t catch any fish, he’s probably not telling the truth.
What is it about a place where lots of anglers go to catch fish, and none of them want to admit where they’ve been going? By lots of anglers, I mean so many going there that it looks like a four-lane bank drive-thru on payday afternoon. These guys are sending e-mail attachments of the redfish they caught to you and everyone else they can think of — not to mention posting the images on Facebook, just to rub it in a little more.
Go to Google Earth and dial in what you think is the vicinity of their favorite location, and you can see tiny wakes from space, made by boats running into and out of the very bays and bayous you were hoping to fish the coming weekend. Dated as the site may be, there were boats then and there’ll be boats now.
When you ask some of these guys, “Where’d you catch all the reds?” trying to narrow down the location a bit, they sort of stammer and stutter, providing you with the old weapons of mass destruction answer.
“You know that area I was fishing is nearly the size of the state of Connecticut, and I just saw a spot that had some clear water, and it was on. I wasn’t really paying attention,” he says chuckling. “I had to use the GPS to get out of there — then it started acting up and I lost the information.”
One of those places, downriver below Morgan City, is Locust Bayou on the western end of Point Au Fer Island next to Atchafalaya Bay. Though there may be a few Locust Liars around, anglers Ken Cooper of Patterson and Ike Darbonne of Bayou Vista will straight up tell you that Locust Bayou is where they get into the redfish each summer.
Cooper, 78, long retired from the mobile-home business, is originally from Mobile, Ala. Prior to that, he was a professional wrestler for 13 years during the 1950s and ’60s, which many consider the golden years of wrestling. Now, Cooper spends his time wrestling redfish whenever he and Darbonne get a chance in and around Locust Bayou.
Cooper’s demeaner is grandfatherly and someone who makes no bones about his Baptist faith. Of course, it sounds more like “Bab-dist” when coming from this southern gentleman’s voice and accent.
Cooper hasn’t been fishing Locust Bayou all that long, claiming to originally being a bass fisherman.
“I’ve been fishing Locust for about 8 years,” he said. “What makes Locust so good is you’ve got structure, you’ve got shells, it has baitfish and shrimp, it’s got ponds that they can get into for feeding, and redfish like all that.”
Like a lot of fishermen, Cooper and Darbonne prefer moving, clear water. During the spring and sometimes into the early summer, the water in and around Locust Bayou can be dirty, influenced by too much fresh water, where the fishing can be slow. It takes a south wind to push the salt water in to keep the muddy waters of the Atchafalaya River out the region in the spring for the fishing to be at its best.
Darbonne, 59, makes his living as an electrician, and is also an avid freshwater angler.
“Later in the summer, fall and winter are best,” he said. “The fishing is better when the water is dropping, because it’s coming out of the ponds, but on an incoming tide, you’ll catch them coming back in, and you’re fishing them trolling the canals.”
Darbonne, probably because of his bass-angling prowess, steadily keeps his bait in the water when working the shorelines of Locust.
While Darbonne chunks a ¼-ounce jig with an avocado red glitter H&H Cocahoe, Cooper pops his under a modified cork.
Casting toward the bank, where it’s shallow and getting hung up in the shells is a regular occurrence, the two fishermen utilize several tactics to avoid and mitigate the condition.
“When fishing in Locust, if you’re going to fish on the bottom don’t use a heavy jig head,” Cooper advised. “I’ll use a 3/16-ounce jig head with the bait. I’ll also use and sometimes go with a ¼-ounce jig, but nothing bigger than that. You don’t want to use a heavy jig head when you’re fishing on the bottom because you’ve got too many shells down there to get caught on. When you’re not using a cork, you want to reel it fast enough to keep it just off the top of those shells. You’ll feel it bump, and then they gobble it.”
Cooper will buy over-the-counter pre-rigged popping corks complete with wire leaders ready to go, but will make one small important adjustment to them. Typically, the pre-rigged sets come with approximately 24 inches of leader. Cooper will disassemble the rig and clip off 8 to 10 inches. The modified cork, jig head and Cocahoe is now less prone to getting hung up in the shells, making it an excellent shallow-water rig.
“I usually have my rigs already made,” Cooper said. “I always have extra corks that I redo in plastic bags, along with extra line, because I have had to restring out there. I’ll take the ones I redo and fish in about 15 inches of water. When you get close to the bank, you’re only in about a foot of water, and since I fish out there so often, I know where most of the shell banks are.”
When fishing his plastic under a cork, Cooper will switch and use a heavier 3/8-ounce jig head.
“I don’t care what anybody tells you — if you use that avocado and red glitter color, it’s the best bait out there. And I’ve tried everything.”
Though Cooper insists the avocado baits are best, he also packs his tackle bag with a diverse group of others.
“I go prepared with topwater and diving baits,” he said. “If I want to use baits like Rat-L-Traps in certain areas, I will. But I have spoons as well, and I’ll use them occasionally in a little deeper water.”
Besides redfish, Cooper also says at certain times of the year specks can be had under certain conditions.
“One of the ponds we went into recently, the birds were diving,” he said. “We shut it down and started throwing where the birds were diving. In 20 minutes, we put 48 specks in the boat. They hit as soon as the bait hit the water because it was only about a foot deep. We watch the birds, but I think it’s the shells that do it.”
Redfish anglers who frequent Locust prefer a falling tide. Cooper says under normal conditions, the redfish are in the ponds when the tide starts dropping.
“They’ve got a sense to get out of the ponds,” he said. “You get at the mouth of one of those ponds, and you can catch your limit right there if you don’t move.”
When it comes to fishing Locust Bayou for redfish, you won’t get a hedge answer or half truth from Cooper or Darbonne. They’ll point you in the right direction and share a few baits too.
