Rhett Buteau admitted a little guiltily that he is obsessive about fishing.
“I’m probably a tad overboard, as any sac-a-lait (crappie) fisherman can get,” Buteau said. “It’s all I think about. I log every trip. I record date, catch, water level, moon phase, color of bait and style of bait. I tie my own jigs.
“My wife Lorin understands how I love what I do out there. She never holds me back, in spite of the time it takes away from her.”
And that amounts to a lot of time. Buteau fishes for sac-a-lait an average of three days a week for nine months of the year. He goes frogging once or twice a week for six months of the year.
Buteau can only be described as a man of passions. Obviously chasing sac-a-lait is one passion. Frogging is another.
Baseball was a true passion, he said, but added, “that part of my life has passed by.”
Defining “passion” is difficult, but putting it in relative terms helps define what Buteau means by the word. He likes deer hunting, chasing them 60 days a year — far more than most dedicated deer hunters.
But he doesn’t define it as a passion.
“When I’m deer hunting, I think about sac-a-lait and frogging a lot,” Buteau said. “When I’m fishing or frogging, I never think about deer.”
The baseball thing ended up with him playing four years at LSU during the Bertman-Laval era, starting in his sophomore year as a center fielder. He loved all sports as a kid but realized in high school that at 5 feet, 8 inches he just wasn’t tall enough for basketball.
Buteau developed into a baseball talent in what he called, “the hard way.” That meant no special coaching, no camps and no special travel teams.
“I still don’t believe in those things,” he said. “I believe that a child either has talent or doesn’t.
“My practice was me and my old man (father Steve) with a 5-gallon bucket of balls in the front yard. My mom (Liz) would shag the balls and throw them back to us. For eye-hand coordination, I would throw tennis balls against a brick wall as hard as I could. I wouldn’t stop until I caught 50 bounce-backs in a row.”
Buteau said that, as a youngster, he fished for everything, but the one fish he had trouble catching consistently was sac-a-lait.
“All I knew was to buy a bucket of shiners and sit at a wellhead all day long and come home with 10 on a good day,” he said. “Dad knew that I had something for sac-a-lait, so he coached me to talk to my uncle Eric (Buteau). He fished with artificials and, in my opinion, he is the best.
“I’ve been hard-core for 18 years. During college, baseball interfered. I never cheated my baseball; I gave it everything. When it ended, I went back to fishing and it was on.”
Buteau fishes from Henderson to Houma, but his specialty is the Atchafalaya Basin from Henderson to Pierre Part.
“The Basin is part of me,” he explained. “I am in one of the few families that had camps out there.
“It has a special place in my heart. My grandpa, Walter Buteau, had a camp on the Atchafalaya River for 60 years, until he died in his 80s.”