Inshore Fishing

Lure lore

“What they bitin’ on?”

Odds are that will be the first question one angler will ask another who is having a good day. It is easy to assume that professional guides, people whose livings hinge on catching fish, would have the biggest assortment of lures.[…]

Inshore Fishing

Transition tactics

Capt. John Aucoin defines the spring transition period in eastern Terrebonne as the months of March and April. Through February, speckled trout will be found bunched mostly in waters north of Catfish Lake.[…]

Inshore Fishing

Redfish and bass love swimbaits

With the combination of redfish and largemouth bass becoming more prevalent around Lafitte because of the Davis Pond diversion canal, it only makes sense for anglers to throw baits that target both fish at one time.[…]

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Davis Pond Speck Effect

While telling me about how the Davis Pond Diversion has affected speckled trout fishing around Lafitte, Capt. Theophile Bourgeois mentioned something that I don’t think he realized provided a perfect contrast of the life before and after the levee break started flowing.[…]

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Vanishing Eden

The smoke/glitter sparkle beetle arched through the air toward a handful of scraggly, brush sticks poking out of the water — the few remains of the live black mangroves that once covered a substantial island.[…]

Inshore Fishing

Cleaning redfish and drum

Redfish and black drum are substantially more difficult to clean than are speckled trout. The heavy bone structure and larger scales make knife control more difficult, often resulting in leaving large amounts of flesh on the carcass.[…]

Columns

Lil John new go-to bait

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.[…]

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Early Trestle Trout

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.[…]

Inshore Fishing

Captain’s log book an important

March 7 of last year was Capt. Travis Miller’s first day of 2011 to fish the train trestle. When I asked him a few weeks ago what details he could recall about the trip, he told me that he was just then looking through his log book.[…]

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Fried Rice

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.[…]

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Inshore Fishing

Tippets

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.[…]