LaCoste is bringing in limits fishing reefs and working birds
Capt. Marty LaCoste had one of his best days ever on the water Wednesday, and considering how many days he fishes, that’s saying something.
“I think I had the fastest limit of my life today,” said LaCoste, with Absolute Fishing Charters out of Dularge. “We got done before 7, and we probably started around 6:20.”
That’s 25 specks on ice in about 30 minutes, but LaCoste said he could have done the same thing with even more anglers.
“I could have had four limits,” he said. “We could have caught 200 trout in the same time.”
LaCoste said speckled trout are stacked up in the lakes around Dularge, and Louisiana anglers have the remnants of Hurricane Patricia that blew through a couple of weeks ago to thank for the bounty of fish available now.
“That pushed all that high-salinity water in from the Gulf, and it pretty much made the final push for all those trout to come in,” he said.
And last weekend’s cool front, which dropped the water temperature by about 10 degrees, didn’t hurt, either. LaCoste suspects this bite will continue until a couple of cool fronts with a little more punch push water temperatures into the lower-60s or upper-50s.
“There’s birds and shrimp everywhere in the lakes right now. Usually this pattern of fish under birds in the lakes will stay through mid-November, until we get a good cold snap that drops those water temps to 60 and below,” he said. “Once it gets in the low 60s, those fish usually push into the deeper bayous and dead-end canals.
“But they haven’t shown up in those places yet.”
Where they have shown up is Sister Lake, Lake Mechant and Lost Lake, and LaCoste said he’s getting reports that some trout have made it up into Lake De Cade.
“Right now we’re smoking them on green hornet Matrix Shad,” he said. “If you get on a good flock of birds that have good fish under them, you really want to be throwing a double-rig because you’ll catch them two at a time.
“On Monday under a cork, the green hornet worked better than the Matrix Shad shrimp creole, and shrimp creole is what we normally use everyday under a cork. But they were hitting the green hornet better.”
Although he’s been catching loads of trout, LaCoste said the bite was more tentative earlier in the week.
“The last couple of days they were pretty finicky — they were mouthing the bait, hitting the tail. It was a really subtle bite,” he said. “It wasn’t an easy bite, but we did catch under a cork as well. Some people struggle tight-lining when the bite is like that, so for someone who has a hard time feeling the bite, they would be better off with a cork.”
LaCoste always uses ¼-ounce jigheads, and goes 18 inches to 2 feet under a cork.
Once the water temperature cools, LaCoste transitions away from double rigs, but still sticks with a ¼-ounce jighead.
“Once they get into their winter pattern, we don’t throw the double-rig anymore,” he said. “We stick to a single rig, and it’s usually a slow, slow retrieve on the bottom.”
High winds forecast for this weekend will likely make trout fishing tough, but LaCoste said the next few weeks should be pretty special out of Dularge.
“As soon as everything settles down again next week, it should really be on,” he said.
