This Plaquemines Parish port has been hot since Katrina, and it shows no signs of cooling off.
It happens to me all the time. Somebody begins relating the account of some event or occurrence, and in telling the story their account is filled with unrelated and unnecessary details.For example, consider the following dialog:
POLICE OFFICER: “So, the guy ran the red light and hit your car broadside?”
CITIZEN: “Well, I was going to my Aunt Bessie’s house; she lives just around the corner at 2121 Songbird Lane. At least she used to live there until the hurricane flooded her house. Now she lives at …”
POLICE OFFICER: “I just need to know what happened, ma’am. I don’t need all those details. Now, did that car run the red light …”
CITIZEN: “That’s what I was trying to tell you. I was bringing a potted plant to my Aunt Bessie’s house. It’s her birthday and … well, it’s not really her birthday today. Her birthday is Friday, but I won’t be able to visit her on Friday because I have a doctor’s appointment about my bursitis. It took so long to get that appointment that I didn’t want to break it so I …”
POLICE OFFICER: “ARGHHH! Lady, just get to the point!”
That is a not-so-fictional account of how frustrating it can be to get information out of some people. They seem absolutely unable to cut past all the peripheral and unnecessary details and simply get to the point.
Anglers would also be wise to get to the Pointe this month — as in Pointe a la Hache.
The fact is, it’s been my intention to get to the Pointe ever since Katrina ran over it and buried it under 20 feet of water. But one thing or another kept me away until I bumped into a friend, Tony Cash, who mentioned he’d been slaughtering trout there all summer.
Cash is a sales manager at Coca Cola, and as avid an outdoorsman as I’ve ever known. He’s fished the Delacroix and Pointe a la Hache area since he was a teenager, and he used to fish it year round until he got bit with deer-hunting fever. Now he switch-hits between hunting deer with a bow, a muzzleloader and a rifle, and squeezes in some outstanding Pointe a la Hache fishing in the colder months of the year.
Being temporarily boatless and not exactly being the shy type, I asked Cash to take me fishing. Well, maybe I begged, but just a little. I wanted to get a trip in before he switched gears and spent all his time in the woods chasing deer.
We arranged to meet at Beshel’s Marina, which took quite a pounding by last year’s storm. All the old slips and boat sheds are gone, and the hoist is inoperable, but the backdown is open, and they’ve reopened the store inside a portable building set up on the old concrete slab and stocked it with some accessories. Ice is available, but no bait.
I saw only one other boat launch the morning we arrived just at daybreak, and we tossed our gear into Cash’s 24-foot Kenner. The 225-horsepower Mercury EFI got us moving down the Back Levee Canal and then up Uhlan Bay into the bottom of American Bay.
The wind was blowing much harder than predicted; instead of the 5-to-10 the weatherman called for, we had 15-to-20 blowing almost straight out of the northwest.
Our original game plan was to head to Battledore Reef, where the action has been excellent all summer. So far, a couple of minor fronts had moved through but nothing hard enough to displace the trout that have stayed congregated around the wells and rigs in Black Bay.
At least that’s what we thought.
And there hasn’t been much pressure on the shrimp this season, simply because of the scarcity of operable shrimp boats and shrimpers. We figured the shrimp would stay outside for a while longer, at least until the real cold fronts came down, and you know the trout will linger as long as their food supply does.
But the heavy northwest winds made for a rough ride to Battledore. The seas were a solid 3 feet and building the farther out we got.
The first stop was a pair of badly battered rigs surrounded by a lot of exposed debris in the water. The huge storage tanks on one rig were bent and battered, and what was left of the rig next to it looked like it had been beaten with a wrecking ball. The wreckage gives mute testimony to the tremendous power of water.
Cash putted carefully around some debris, and dropped the anchor.
“This spot has been red hot all summer long,” he said as we baited up our hooks.
We had three bait-wells full of live stuff that Cash took pains to obtain and keep alive just for our trip. He had a fiberglass shop mold in a custom series of bait-wells across the entire back of his boat. If you didn’t know it, you’d think the boat came rigged that way. Then he had them custom make a fish box molded across the front that served also as a step up to the bow platform.
Cash made a special trip to Campo’s in Shell Beach to purchase the bait, so now we had live shrimp, croakers and even cocohoes to choose from. If we failed to catch fish with all this bait, we’d have to find a good excuse.
We gave the rig a good shot but had no takers. We tried bait under a cork and Carolina-rigged, and we tried shrimp and croakers with no success. Ten minutes after we arrived, Cash was ready to move.
“The water is really dirty here,” he said. “Let’s go find a spot out of this wind.”
Cash has one of those hyperdrive personalities that seems to thrive on constant motion. We ran to a second rig and dropped anchor in similar conditions. We were somewhat out of the pounding seas, but the water was still ugly. Five minutes later, we moved again.
This time the plan was to hide behind some of the land mass nearer to the river around Taylor’s Point. There we hoped to find calmer and cleaner water.
But what we found was mud. The strong winds had blown much of the water out, and what was left was super shallow and super muddy. The big Mercury outboard ate a lot of mud that morning as we churned our way around and then moved over toward Deepwater Point and around Fort Bayou to try to find better conditions, but to no avail.
Kelly Gap and California Point were no better.
That’s when Cash decided to pull out all stops and start the search for cleaner water. But that meant a jarring ride across Black Bay with Cash at the helm who knows only one speed: wide open. We ran a white-knuckled 40 m.p.h. in 4-foot seas to Pelican Island and then over to Iron Banks.
Sadly, Pelican is a sliver of its former self, and Iron Banks is only pilings and stones, with a small portion of the old barge showing.
Cash said Lonesome Island is also mostly gone, another victim of Katrina. Too bad, I thought. I used to catch a lot of trout at Lonesome.
Iron Banks looked more promising than did the other stops, and it was obvious the farther east we went the clearer the water became. After 10 minutes and one trout, Cash pulled the anchor and said we were heading to the Wreck.
The old submerged crane that was the original wreck looks pretty much as it did pre-Katrina, but the Wreck rig was busted all up by the hurricane’s winds and waves. We could see several workers busy on the rig making repairs to some of the tattered structure, and they watched us as we anchored.
I saw a boat anchored at the big Wreck rig, but they seemed bored or frustrated by a lack of success.
“The water here is much better, so let’s fish every way,” Cash said. “On bottom, under a cork … I know there are fish here.”
Brian Graves, my cousin, decided to try freelining a fat shrimp out of the livewell. It’s a favorite technique of his, and one that has proven to be successful, especially on those days when all else fails.
I tried a Carolina rig, and promptly hung up on the bottom. Cash pulled out his favorite heavy-duty rig, an Ambassador 6500 C3 strung up with heavier monofilament line, which he loaded up with a live croaker and set out on the bottom.
But Graves had a hit, and a quick set of the hook resulted in a bent pole and a hefty trout splashing in protest all the way back to the boat.
Turns out that’s what the trout would hit that day, and he had the hot stick. We stayed there and caught a nice mess of specks, a few on a Carolina rig and some even under a cork. But freelining almost guaranteed a good hit and a hefty trout.
In the fall, these fish will certainly switch into a transition mode. It’s as inevitable as the shortening of the daylight as winter slowly creeps in. Cash says that you’ll still be able to catch trout outside at the structures and islands as long as the shrimp remain. Barring any tropical weather, they could hang out there for quite awhile.
But natural instinct will also kick in, and they’ll begin that annual trek into inside waters.
First they’ll begin to show up in the big outer bays, around reefs, points and cuts.
Fall is really a great time of year to drift the open bays around reefs and islands. The weather is cooler, the air has a light feel to it instead of that thick, heavy, sweltering summer air, and you can usually catch just as many fish on plastics as you can with live baits.
Bay Lafourche, Pointe Fienne, Bakers Bay, Bay Jack, Bay Ponton and others will produce trout this month, Cash said.
Then, from the bays they’ll set up housekeeping in the major passes into the marsh. The pass between Second and Third Bay, Bayou Ponton, Big Four, Little Four, Bayou Dominique and False River will become the hotspots.
Cash says he does drift the open bays, but prefers to drift bayous and passes, or he’ll anchor near points and cuts where he finds clean, moving water.
Live cocahoes on the bottom or plastic beetles fished tandem are his preferred baits, he said.
“My technique will vary very little,” Cash said. “The more we get into the fall, the shrimp usually get skimpier, and I’ll switch mostly to plastics. The live stuff won’t really be necessary, so that’s one way to cut down your fishing expense. Also, you don’t have to run as far in the fall and winter, so that saves fuel, which nowadays is the biggest cost factor when you go fishing.
“And when it comes to fishing plastics, I only use one thing: beetles, in tandem, fished on the bottom. That’s it. I buy them pre-rigged, 12 on a card. They’re called Cajun Trout Catchers, made by a fellow named Russell Pierce who sells them down at the marinas in Cocodrie. They look like the regular, old timey, normal-sized split-tail beetles, but these have a unique head on the jigs. This is what most of the guides down there use all fall and winter long. If the guides use them, they must produce pretty good, right?
“And I only use a few colors: chartreuse, clear, purple and that mercurochrome (pinkish) color. I’ll switch colors back and forth between those four colors if the action is slow, but I never switch baits.
“When I do bring live bait in the fall months, it’s cocahoes, and I mostly bring those for catching redfish.”
Cash says his favorite place to fish for reds is along the shorelines of Oak River Bay, near the entrance of Oak River.
“I just fish along the oyster reefs on the shoreline, casting a live cocaho on a Carolina rig,” he said. “Try the various cuts and points wherever you see oysters and find clean, moving water. You’ll find the reds right there.”
Sounds pretty simple. And when it comes right down to it, there’s a lot to be said for simplicity.
