Trout, redfish fall for plastics and topwaters.
When Scott Walker, a.k.a. “nightfisher” on LouisianaSportsman, messaged me that I needed to tie on a MirrOlure Top Dog Jr. before I left for our trip, I knew we were in for some fun. He had been chasing trout around Point Fienne Bay and Skippy Lake, and they were suckers for the topwaters when they were up chasing bait.
Although Walker, who has gotten into the habit of texting pictures of his catches to me when I’m not able to be on the water, was mainly targeting school trout, the proof was in his pictures that there were some big fish mixed in with the popcorn trout. One particular image showed Walker holding a 4-pound trout.
I met Walker (aka “nightfisher” on LouisianaSportsman.com, along with Joe Dunaway and Dave Dunaway, at Sweetwater Marina down at Delacroix Island. A short 10-minute run and we were tossing topwaters. However, the trout never surfaced at our first stop, so Walker asked Dave Dunaway to make the quick run to Skippy Bay.
“Look at them,” Walker said breathlessly as he pointed toward a small island that had signs of feeding trout all around it. “Trout are chasing shrimp and needle fish. They’ll blow up in a section like this here, and you’ll stay on them 10 or 15 minutes and they’ll disappear.
“They they’ll show up 100 yards away from the boat. You just got to stay on them – no anchor. You anchor and you’re a dead duck.”
For the past few weeks, Walker has been throwing a chartreuse Top Dog Jr. when the trout were up. As the trout go back down to the bottom, Walker has been switching to Hybrid Flurry Minnows and swimming them about a foot under the surface. Plastic color hasn’t seemed to matter, as Walker threw three different colors a few days before our trip and the trout ate all three.
The trout around this particular island remained a little on the small side, although most were keeper fish, and they didn’t stay on the surface very long. And on this day, the fish didn’t seem to want a very fast retrieve with the plastics. Rather, they wanted our plastics suspended about a foot under a cork.
In an effort to find some larger trout, we bounced around a few pockets in Point Fienne Bay, but what we found was a mix of 12- to 14-inch trout, redfish and even some flounder. All were caught on a variety of Berkley Gulp! plastics with the natural-colored shrimp style getting the most action.
By the end of the day, we had to work a little harder for our fish than what Walker had anticipated because the topwater bite shut down around 7:30 a.m., and we didn’t even start fishing until about 7. But we took advantage of what Delacroix has to offer by catching a mixed box almost within sight of the water tower.
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