Living (DU)large

There are thousands of acres of ponds in the DuLarge area, and many of them hold redfish that seem to be swimming in air.

Heaven for Brennan Head feels a lot like hell.

When the rest of South Louisiana is perspiring at leisure and debating the feasibility of cooking breakfast on the sidewalk, Head is smiling.

When the air is so heavy and still it seems almost impenetrable, Head gets a little extra lift in his steps.

When sunlight scorches the earth through cloudless skies, Head wants to be no place other than outside.

Head is a shallow-water redfish angler, and heat, still air and sunlight are closer friends to him than any old high-school buddy or fraternity brother.

The 27-year-old Houma native has spent the past two decades exploring the marshes just to the southwest of Theriot, in a part of the world known to locals as DuLarge.

He runs wide-open through ponds shallower than kiddie pools, and cuts through hyacinth patches like his propeller is a lawn mower.

His domain scares off most boaters, but Head cavalierly forges onward to waters that have never seen baits.

He is perpetually lured by the promise of schools of unmolested redfish. They captured his fancy when he was a young boy fishing this same area with his grandfather, and still today, no other passion rivals this one.

And Head has sharpened his skills so acutely that now he’s making money doing what he loves. He’s become one of the most-successful anglers on the professional redfish tournament circuits, consistently placing in the top 10, and even winning the recent FLW stop in Galveston, Texas.

Head and his partner, Brandon Garrison, earned a $25,000 payday in that event, and vaulted into sixth place in the FLW team-of-the-year competition.

Head has also fished Redfish Cup and Redfish Tour events, and has placed well in those, some of the best being when he had his girlfriend as his teammate.

Head’s successful techniques were on full display during a recent trip to his home waters. Conditions were ideal as a 125-horsepower Yamaha pushed the 20-foot Alumaweld across Lake DeCade and into a section of shallow marsh that Head has fished since he was a kid.

The boat, which Head borrowed for the outing from his father, would serve as his platform for the day. Its shallow draft would be his ticket for a journey to a world that few in Louisiana ever get to see.

The marshes of inland DuLarge look like a mutated cross of Venice, Delacroix and Punta Gorda. Coontail patches give way to extensive flats of eel grass. Like nature’s charcoal filters, the vegetation grabs sediments and nutrients coming in with the opaque water from the lakes and bays, and delivers something quite pristine on the other side.

The clear water of the ponds appears root beer-colored because of the dark mud on the bottom, but its clarity is ever evident by the richly golden redfish that seem to float on air beneath its surface.

The shores of the ponds are peppered with roseau cane, cattails, bull tongue, elephant ears and duck potato, each growing in distinct patches as if governed by segregation laws.

Head found a hotdog-shaped pond that caught his fancy, and he eased the boat from plane, killed the motor and moved toward the bow.

“This water looks pretty good,” he said. “It should get even better as the day goes on.”

The tide was low, but was beginning to rise, and that delighted Head. Unlike many shallow-water redfish anglers, he actually prefers a rising tide.

“A redfish is an eating machine,” he said. “He’s going to follow the bait, wherever it is.

“On a rising tide, the bait will be moving into the ponds, and the redfish are going to follow it.”

Head looked out across the narrow pond, and instantly spotted a bronze fish with an iridescent blue tail that was easing along beside a grass mat.

“There’s a fish,” he said as casually as if picking up groceries at the corner market.

He cast a white H&H Bull Minnow 2 feet in front of the lolligagging fish, and set the hook hard when 2 feet of bronze muscle charged and chomped his bait.

The water erupted, and two fish appeared out of nowhere behind the one that had just gotten hooked.

Louisiana Sportsman Field Editor John McQueen was quick to feed one of them.

Two minutes into the trip, and already the first double of the day was bending rods and stretching lines.

Most of the time, anglers in such a predicament spend many moments of the fight dancing in a “redfish dosey-doe” as the fish run different ways and then back again.

But Head, being a tournament angler, is a big believer in getting fish into the boat as quickly as possible.

He doesn’t play around.

Rather than noodle rods and skinny monofilament that make fighting a powerful redfish an adventure, Head uses a 7-foot medium-heavy Falcon rod, and running through its guides is 8-pound diameter FINS braided line.

“Where I fish, there’s so much grass that you’ve got to use strong equipment or else you’ll lose most of the fish you hook,” he said.

That grass also dictates what Head uses for bait. The staple of South Louisiana redfish anglers is a so-called “beetle-spin” — a jighead-impaled beetle or cocaho tail teamed with a gold spinner.

And Head acknowledges the productivity of beetle-spins. But the skinny waters he fishes are simply too clogged with grass to effectively work with such a bait.

So instead, he fishes with the soft-plastic tails sans the spinners.

“You can work it over and around grass much easier (without the spinner),” he said.

He also likes gold Red Ripper spoons made by Nemire. The spoons sport brush hook guards to make them weedless, similar to the ones found on most bass jigs. They’re also more buoyant than most spoons, which means they can easily be pulled over grass beds.

Head and McQueen both hoisted their fish over the gunwale — Head much quicker than McQueen — and were back on the lookout for more bronze bodies.

They wouldn’t have to look far or wait long.

“There’s one … and another … and another. Look at that — a whole school,” Head said, finally with a tinge of excitement in his voice.

He and McQueen cast baits, and instantly hooked up. The other fish charged to and fro crazily, looking for the baitfish that two of their members had discovered so easily.

The school had collected in a narrow ditch that ran roughly along the center of the pond, and that’s very typical during the warm-weather months, according to Head.

“In the summer, the fish go up onto the shallows to feed, but they can’t stay there for very long — it’s too hot — so they move into the little ditch in the middle of the pond. Most ponds have these,” he said. “They might only be 2 feet deep, but that’s where the coolest, most-oxygenated water will be.”

Head explained that the reds will rest in the ditch for several minutes or hours, almost as if catching their breath, reloading for another run onto the flats to terrorize finger mullet.

But as summer turns to autumn, and autumn to winter, the reds spend less time in the ditches and more time on the flats doing what redfish do best — feeding.

“In the winter, you’ll find them in real skinny water,” Head said. “They can stay there all day because the water’s so much cooler.”

Fish in the ditches are more challenging to get to bite than those on the flats, according to Head.

“When a fish is up on a flat feeding, if you get a bait anywhere near him, he’s going to eat it,” he said. “The fish in the ditches aren’t feeding, so you have to convince them to eat.”

That’s made considerably easier when ditch fish are grouped up in schools. The competitive nature of fish becomes their undoing. No redfish wants to let a bait get away only to watch it fall prey to a competitor.

Schools in the ditches are most common at the end of summer, when the shallow pond water has been boiled all season long by the unblinking sun.

This time of year, as the sun gets lower on the horizon, the fish are forced to retreat to the sanctuary of the ditches less frequently.

That makes October one of Head’s favorite months for shallow-water sight-fishing.

“October’s a great month,” he said. “The water’s cooling off, but the weather’s still pretty stable. You do get some winds from fronts, but it’s not like later in the winter.”

The DuLarge area is absolutely peppered with ponds, and all of them hold some level of productivity.

But Head doesn’t just throw a dart at a map to pick a place to fish. He runs through ponds looking for aquatic vegetation that suits him.

“It has to be the right grass,” he said. “You don’t want to fish ponds with stagnant, dead grass — that grass you can smell, it stinks. That’s not going to be productive. Those ponds have no bait and no movement.

“You want to fish ponds with good, healthy grass.”

Two species of grass predominate in the DuLarge area — coontail and eel grass. Head says both are about equally productive, although eel grass is more forgiving when a bait is retrieved through it.

Head will run through prospective ponds with his boat on plane looking at the quality of the grass and also surveying the surface of the water for redfish wakes. If he sees what he likes, he’ll return to the pond later after things have settled back down.

When he pulls into a pond to fish it, he’ll start at the front of the pond and work his way toward the back to avoid stirring things up.

“You want to be behind the grass mats because that’s where the water will be the most filtered,” he said. “There won’t necessarily be more fish in the clear water, but you can see them so much more easily.”

And seeing them is the name of the game for Head. He doesn’t waste a lot of time blind-casting. He stands on the front gunwale of his boat — often on tiptoes — and scans the water as far out as he can see.

He’s a big believer in high-quality polarized eyewear. He wears a pair of Costa Del Mar sunglasses with 580 amber lenses, and wouldn’t ever leave the dock without them.

“They’re the most-important thing in the boat,” he said. “You’re wasting your time sight-fishing with a bad pair of sunglasses.”

On breezy days, he also reads the surface of the water.

“When you see a ripple going against the main ripple, you know that’s a fish,” he said. “If you see enough of them, you begin to learn which of those ripples are redfish.”

In October, a ruffled water surface is not uncommon, so Head will spend as much time looking at the water as through it.

Although every shallow-water redfish angler would prefer slick-calm conditions over wind, fishing on such breezy days does have its advantages.

“When it’s windy, the fish are a whole lot less spooky,” Head said. “If you see a fish — or a fish wake — that fish’ll bite.”

Head has his best success this time of year in ponds near L’il Deuce, Bay Long, Raccourci, Bayou Sauveur and Deep Saline. The Bayou Rambo field is also extremely productive, but much of it has been blocked to public access.

He’ll be in the former areas this year getting a little taste of heaven on earth.

About Todd Masson 724 Articles
Todd Masson has covered outdoors in Louisiana for a quarter century, and is host of the Marsh Man Masson channel on YouTube.