When trout stack up in this Lafitte hotspot, the action is so good missing a limit is pretty difficult — if you understand the dance.
I couldn’t figure out why my son wasn’t making a cast.
It was obvious where the fish were. The gulls dive bombing nervous shrimp was a dead give-away.
We were with Captains James Wilson and Lane Zimmer of Phil Robichaux Fishing Charters (504-689-2006), and they had already put 10 trout in the boat.
Matthew tends to zone out sometimes, but this was getting embarrassing.
Not sure whether it was performance anxiety or simply that he had not awaken fully yet, Wilson and Zimmer tried to playfully encourage him to get a bait in the water.
Perhaps it was because he had already made four casts without catching anything.
Reluctantly, he finally made another.
“Ya boy done Boudreauxed me,” Zimmer cracked.
If it was performance anxiety, that definitely didn’t help matters any.
Apparently, to Wilson and Zimmer, “Boudreaux” is a verb that means to cast one’s line across another angler’s line.
Not to brag about my kid or anything, but, dang, can Matthew ever Boudreaux people.
Many times that morning, he Boudreauxed us three at a time.
We couldn’t blame him, really. The trout were so thick under the birds, that sometimes his gusto got the best of him.
In fact, Wilson had him a streak of coming in from 30 straight trips with limits of trout going on.
“Looking to make it 31,” he said as he fluidly pulled in another trout, unhooked it and threw it in the box.
He was looking to extend his streak at the mouth of a canal where Bay L’ours and Brusle Lake meet.
“Clovelly Canal,” Zimmer told me.
Somewhat confused, I asked him to explain how this was Clovelly Canal because I thought the one farther to the north in Little Lake was Clovelly Canal.
“This whole area is considered Clovelly,” he explained as he pointed to marsh between the two canals on his mobile phone map. “You got the one main canal up north, and you got this one down here.”
However, the one at Little Lake is more of a straight shot, whereas the one at the back of Bay L’Ours has a maze of dead-end canals spreading out in every direction.
Since Wilson had done most of his damage those 30 straight trips on ghost/chartreuse Captain Lane Ghost Minnows fished about 18 inches under popping corks, he didn’t see any reason to change.
What I discovered fishing these Ghost Minnows with Wilson, Zimmer and my son was that this particular section of Clovelly was tailor-made fishing this time of year.
Simply put, colder weather pushes trout toward the backs of dead-end canals.
Warming weather pushes them right back out.
This particular stretch of Clovelly Canal we were fishing was apparently a major migration route for trout as they moved back out to the bays during a warming trend right after a cold snap.
“I’ve been catching most of my trout stacked up farther back in the canals,” Wilson told me as we idled down to a different stretch of the main canal. “It’s pretty simple, really: They’re either going to be in the backs or they’re going to be out in the bays.”
As long as the birds are picking, they’ll give away the location of the trout.
On this particular Saturday morning, the birds stopped picking fairly early because of all the boat traffic in the canal.
With only 40 trout in the box, Wilson realized that we had to make a move.
He decided to see if there were any stragglers remaining in the backs of the canals.
“We don’t have any water movement this morning, but we should be able to go back there and pick on them a while,” he said. “If we don’t get on a good bite, we’ll move back out in the bays.”
After the birds stopped working, the action wasn’t nearly as fast and furious as it was first thing that morning.
However, Wilson was able to put us on scattered pockets of fish that hadn’t quite decided to move out of the backs of the canals yet.
Zimmer seemed to have the hottest stick, and he continually encouraged my son to get back in the game.
“You can’t catch a fish if your bait ain’t in the water,” he chortled. “Those Ghost Minnows are good, but they won’t work unless you actually make a cast.”
With 40 fish in the boat when the birds stopped, our 100-fish limit looked well beyond reach as we moved toward the backs of the canals.
“Our fall (last year) was outstanding (after) Hurricane Isaac moved through,” Wilson told me. “We got a lot of bait, and it moved all the fish to the inside. We hammered out limits of trout every day.”
I could tell there was a little bit of a monkey on Wilson’s back when he started speaking about limits.
Our conversation interrupted sporadically by head-shaking speckled trout, Wilson told me that the fishing around Clovelly Canal is typically good during the fall and early winter, as long as it stays mild.
We found most of the trout stacked up in about 10 feet of water, and Wilson put us on the best action by positioning his boat against the side of the canal, where we could cast out toward the middle.
While under the birds, our corks went down just as soon as they hit the water. Farther back in the dead-ends, we actually had to work for the fish a little more.
Still needing 11 or 12 trout to finish our limit, Wilson eventually moved us back into some open bays before settling on the north end of Little Lake.
At the Helicopter Pad, Wilson put a final two fish in the boat. One, the largest of the day, pulled his cork under while he was talking on his cell phone.
“For a day that started off fast and furious — we were throwing trout in the boat left and right — it just slowed down next to nothing,” Wilson noted. “We had no tide today. We had to work for them a little bit, but we’ve got 90 in the boat.
To his credit, Wilson was able to see the sliver lining around the dark cloud that was quickly surrounding his 30-day-limit record.
“I guess the bad days make you appreciate the good days,” he concluded.
Our dock shot back at the marina put our “bad” day into perspective. As 90 trout slid across the stainless surface, our “bad” day started looking a lot better.
Not to offer excuses or anything, but 90 trout for four guys when one of them was holding either a video or still camera most of the time and his son was Boudreauxing everybody all day long didn’t seem all that bad.
In fact, 90 fish felt like 15 more instead of 10 less than a limit.
And as far as I was concerned, I was more than willing to extend Wilson a media mulligan so that his streak could continue.
