Feliciano “Junior” Mendoza has been a charter fishing and waterfowl hunting guide for three years, running Shallow Water Charters (504-258-2131) out of Myrtle Grove.
As glamorous as being a guide sounds, it’s a physically tough business and has been called “a young man’s game.”
At 67, Mendoza can no longer be considered a spring chicken, but he spends every day he can on the water, either fishing or duck hunting.
In between he plays golf.
The energetic man’s fishing specialties are shallow-water marsh bass and redfish — “mainly redfish,” he stressed.
Fit, craggy-featured and deeply tanned over a dark complexion, he appears to have spent every day of his life on the water. But his tawny skin comes partly from genetics.
“My father was Filipino and my mother was Italian-Irish,” Mendoza explained. “I took after my daddy. I have little if any resemblance to my mother.”
Fishing and hunting didn’t come naturally to Mendoza. Unlike many die-hard outdoorsmen, he didn’t have a father, grandfather or uncles who had the bug.
Mendoza said he grew up poor in the Iberville Housing Project in the heart of New Orleans.
Like many other poor kids during the period, he had few aspirations after high school. But fate and family wouldn’t have it. “My godmother, Vickie Asercion, didn’t give me a choice about going to college,” he said. “She told me to pick my college. I told her I wasn’t planning to go to college; I was going to work.
“She answered back, ‘I didn’t ask you if you wanted to go to college. I told you to pick your college.’”
He got a degree in business administration and began teaching in the Jefferson Parish School system. He quickly followed that with a master’s degree in administration and guidance counseling.
Mendoza began fishing in the 1970s.
“A bunch of teachers I worked with were going bass fishing and invited me along,” he explained. “I started with a Mitchell 300. I wish I had a penny for every reel I’ve owned since then.”
He retired as a junior high school principal in 2000. Then he picked up a second career as director of human resources for the Jefferson Parish Government. He retired again in 2011.
Only then did he begin his charter guiding business.
