Month after month for the last year or so, Jeff Poe has talked glowingly about a soft plastic that he wasn’t sold on until his son and fellow charter boat captain Nick Poe threw him some one day when the younger Poe was tearing them up while very few, if any, speckled trout were going into the boat skippered by Jeff Poe.[…]
Eddie’s “paaaw-ty barge” was aptly named already, but festooned in red, white and green and filled with green-clad revelers for the Irish-Italian boat parade on the Lower Tchefuncte River — well, the USS Paaaw-ty Barge was really strutting her stuff that afternoon.[…]
About this time each year, we get the first invasion of shrimp and crabs into the ponds. With the mild winter, there’s plenty of grass that awaits them. Reds, drum and sheepshead will be rooting them out. Look for tails on calm days.[…]
I am sitting in the dark in Silverfish Lodge’s boat shed waiting for my guide, Charlie Thomason, to return from an errand. Oyster boats, one after another, are chugging and puffing by in Bayou La Loutre, so close I could flip a coin onto their decks.[…]
Mar. 3 — 21st annual Red Stick Day Fly Fishing Festival, LDWF Waddill Outdoors Center, 4141 North Flannery Road, Baton Rouge. Time: 8:30 a.m.-4 p.m. Free admission.[…]
Capt. Charlie Thomason can’t just fish during the summer and the winter, when speckled trout are locked into predictable patterns.[…]
Capt. Charlie Thomason firmly states that 90 percent of fishing during the trout transition is on the move, either with a trolling motor or drifting with a drift sock.[…]
I wanted to time my trip to Dularge to see how long it would take and how many miles it was between my house in Kenner to Capt. Bill Lake’s camp on Bayou Dularge.[…]
I was stuffed and still the food came. I wondered if Gunner Waldmann and David Bertrand were trying to kill me. First, Waldmann forced me to participate in a redfish blowout that morning. Then he hauled me to Shucks Seafood House in Abbeville, where owner Bertrand took over.[…]
The history of the creation of the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge is an interesting one, and weaves together the lives of monied American financial barons and the burgeoning conservationist movement coming out of the Gilded Age.[…]
– The refuge is open for visitors from March 1 to Dec. 1 of each year.[…]
In spite of an almost unworldly number of alligators on the refuge, some of them large, they are seldom, if ever, more than a nuisance.[…]
The prominent V wake was unmistakable, even from my camera boat positioned 50 feet from the anglers working a grass line.[…]
Now, despite the vision advantage, even tower fishing can see its valleys of boredom. Maybe it’s a hot summer day when the fish are holding in deeper, cooler water or hiding under rafts of matted vegetation in the marsh.[…]
The best way to have a fishing hole all to yourself is to fish it when nobody else is there. If that makes me sound like Captain Obvious, so be it. Sometimes the best advice is the simplest advice.[…]
A neap tide is one that occurs when the difference between high and low tide is least. It comes twice a month in the first and third quarters of the moon.[…]