The pink rod made a question mark as the MirrOlure She Dog vanished in an explosion on the surface. When the line knifed through the water, my guide, Kirk Stansel, one of the owners of Hackberry Rod and Gun, and I both wondered aloud, “Speckled trout or redfish?”[…]
“Damn buzzard!” the hunter muttered under his breath as he signed his name across the bottom of the check.It was no consolation that he wasn’t the first deer club rule violator brought to justice by an ugly black bird who makes its living from death.[…]
While participating in numerous fishing tournaments at Venice Marina the past couple of years, one name has consistently shown up on the rig-division leader board — BurstFactor.[…]
The party at Doc’s French Quarter bungalow was an impromptu affair. So an unscheduled visit by Neidermeir (Wesley) and Yoko (Priscilla) caught us off guard.[…]
It was so early in the morning, I couldn’t even see the fluorescent-orange cork that my fishing partner, Eric Dumas, had threaded onto my braided line.[…]
While attending a JAKES Day put on by the National Wild Turkey Federation in Monroe a few years ago, I was asked if I wanted to sign up my son for the JAKES program.[…]
I thought I had it easy when I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s. Boy, was I wrong. Young people today have it made compared to any of the generations that came before them.[…]
There’s no end to the news from wildlife management areas from last hunting season and, more importantly because it’s that time of the year again, going into the 2007-08 hunting season in a true Sportsman’s Paradise.[…]
Having heard more than my fair share of empty boasting and even emptier promises, it was with an exhausted ear that I listened to what my buddy Dennis Tietje was trying to get me to understand over the phone.[…]
The last time I pulled into Capt. Anthony Randazzo’s Paradise Plus lodge in Buras was about two months before Katrina’s infamous visit. The storm’s wash-through left little more than a shell of the log-frame building.[…]
Going on two years after Hurricane Katrina, fishing in the Amite and Tickfaw river basins is still in recovery mode — notwithstanding a countryside fish-restocking scheme set in motion by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries even while department personnel were heroically engaged in search-and-rescue missions in flood-stricken New Orleans.In both areas, return to pre-storm conditions has been painfully slow.[…]
When many Americans think of Louisiana today, they visualize a swampy morass covered in cypress trees and Spanish moss.[…]
When Mike Muhlbauer’s line came tight with an abrupt strike, we were certain it was bull red time. A couple of Florida boys with a lot of ambition but just a little time, Muhlbauer and I had determined that we’d fare best at the perennial redfish magnet — Southwest Pass.[…]
It was just after midnight. The boat was drifting calmly more than a hundred miles offshore. Lights from the largest truss and spar oil platform in the world cast an eerie glow across the water.[…]
A cooking show broadcast in Kansas was planning on featuring a redfish recipe, and they were looking for the most unique way of acquiring the main ingredient in their dish.[…]
Joe DiMaggio once said of opening day, “You look forward to it like a birthday party when you’re a kid. You think something wonderful is going to happen.”[…]