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Cover: April 2005-Specks
ON THE COVER: Sportsman Editor Tadd Masson caught this big trout in March. What’s in store for speck anglers the rest of this year? Find out in this issue.[…]
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The Scoop on the Skinny
Spring inshore fishing can be such a tease. Specks are ready for their reproductive business, but extreme changes in the weather make fish extremely mobile, rendering even the most up-to-date information obsolete.
But that compares little to the games redfish play as they ease into the warm-weather pattern. Reds are more than willing to mass in the shallow ponds and show themselves in all their bronze glory, but getting them to bite is an entirely different matter.[…]
Bass Fishing
Rockets to Ribbits
It was a steamy summer afternoon, and we were fishing in Mama’s Pond in the western Atchafalaya Basin. The water was just high enough to back into the trees and bushes along the shoreline.
My partners and I were throwing chartreuse buzz baits into the cover as far as we could, and we got a few good strikes on top. Still, in some spots, we could see about 8 more feet of good-looking water that we couldn’t touch with those buzz baits. That was 8 feet of fish-holding water that we couldn’t access, and it deeply annoyed us.
We all fiddled with some of the lures in our tackle boxes, and the three of us probably all gave a frog or a rat bait a brief look. It was weedless and maybe suitable for the situation, but that kind of lure is more of a novelty isn’t it? It catches fishermen, right, not bass?
That was our thinking, and it probably cost us dearly.
[…]
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Poor Man’s Lobster
The morning hadn’t gone well. We’d only caught one speckled trout — the only bite we’d had.[…]
Bass Fishing
Perfecting Patterns
Roland Martin is given credit for having coined the phrase “pattern fishing” during the 1970s. He was one of the first anglers in the country to understand that replicating the exact set of water conditions like depth, cover, structure, temperature, clarity and current prevalent when he got a bite would lead to many more bites.[…]
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Lessons Learned
Out of nowhere, the allure of hunting wild turkeys in spring snuck into my bloodstream one April morning in 1992 over in Alabama.[…]
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Insight on Cocodrie’s Inside
It was a typical Louisiana spring day — the wind was howling to beat the band, and the water was, well, less than clear.[…]
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Dirty-Water Reds
We’d just passed the Blue Angel at the entrance to the Naval base when I finally started dozing off. The truck cab was dark and the radio low.[…]
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Basin Bream Bash
Gabby was never much of a fisherman. Oh, sure, she’d go out with the family when we would fish, but just so she could feel the wind in her hair as we ran the boat from one spot to another.[…]
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A Fickle Lady
In the days before any European set foot in the New World, the shorelines surrounding Lake Pontchartrain were inhabited by several Native American tribes. Bayougoula, Mougoulacha, Chitimacha, Colapissa, Quinipissalive and the “corn-gatherers,” or Tangipahoa Indians, fished the big lake they called “Okwa-ta,” the wide water.[…]
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2005 Speck Forecast
As a biologist, Jerald Horst has cut out the livers of speckled trout, and examined them under microscopes.
He’s run his fingers through gravid ovaries packed with ripe, orange roe.
He’s opened stomachs to discover their contents.
But there was nothing scientific about Horst’s reaction last month when a trout as long as a man’s arm carved a hole in the water with its gaping maw, and sucked in his She Dog.
The sounds were loud enough to be heard on the other side of the small marsh lake — first from the fish crashing the bait, then from Horst, who jumped to his feet and squealed like a schoolgirl who just caught a glimpse of her favorite boy-band member.
After several earlier near-misses from other fish, Horst practiced great restraint in letting the big trout take the bait for a second or two before yanking the rod upward like Paul Bunyan starting a swing of his axe.
The light-action rod bowed like a noodle, its tip seeming to crawl along the line, refusing to miss a moment of the action.
A veteran angler who has logged more hours than he’d ever admit in the surf at Grand Isle, Fourchon and Elmer’s Island, Horst had caught bigger trout in his life, but this one was special, just like all fish lured to the surface by a topwater plug.[…]
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Cover: March 2005
ON THE COVER: Learn more about crawfish to increase your bass haul this spring.[…]
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Winter Wading
Human nature seems to require most fishermen to try and make something happen before it’s really the ideal time.[…]
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State of the State’s Turkeys
It stretches my mind to recall it, but I still remember the first wild turkey I ever saw in Louisiana.[…]
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School of Hard Knocks
A few months ago, Louisiana Sportsman readers were shocked and saddened to learn contributing writer Humberto Fontova suffered serious injuries in a freak bicycling accident.
As we wish him a speedy recovery, we should also be resolved to be more careful out there. “There but for the grace of God …”[…]
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Scaredy Rats
Capt. Theophile Bourgeois has no couth.
He lacks respect for tradition.[…]