Features
Pick your poison
I sure was happy when Jeff Poe pointed his boat’s pointy nose north out of Hebert’s Landing on Calcasieu Lake. In the early light, the sky to the south looked like a bruised eggpant — purple and ugly. […]
Fishing
Crappie/Bream
Look down for slabs
Jerry “J.T.” Thompson stared intently at the screen of his 12-inch down-scan unit as he brought the pontoon boat off plane.[…]
Crappie/Bream
Flat out crappie
“The fish have it backwards when it comes to the weather,” Nick Young said as he cruised his big Ranger down the edge of the boat channel, scanning his electronics for suspended crappie.[…]
Contents
Cover: June 2018
Avid surf fisherman Sammy Romano shows off a beautiful speckled trout caught on Curlew Island in the Chandeleur chain. For more surf-fishing tips from Romano, go to page 140.[…]
Features
Get the drop on Trestles specks
The legendary Trestles train bridge on Lake Pontchartrain is loaded with fish — and fishermen — every spring. When the speckled trout bite is super hot and winds are calm, the 5-mile-long bridge often has a boat on almost every piling.[…]
Bass Fishing
Perfecting your pocket hopping
Think of a scavenger hunt: You’re trying to locate a specific objective and the task requires a lot of looking. Random scrambling wastes too much time, so you try to mentally break down the search by likely parameters — where would the hunted items likely exist?[…]
Features
Better late than never
Although he still gets up some mornings at 3 a.m. to participate in the rat race to go catch fish, Kevin Lawson admittedly isn’t as mad at speckled trout as he used to be.[…]
Catfish
Look, mom: No bait!
Catfishing is supposed to be all about a gob of slimy worms, or bloody chicken liver, or smelly cut bait — or better yet some concoction of secret ingredients, usually including spoiled sour cheese.[…]
Columns
The silver king
When an angler sets a hook in a tarpon, there is an explosion. There’s no delayed action fuse in this fish. The water erupts and a platinum-silver streak shears the surface with the force of a depth charge exploding.[…]
Fishing
Daiwa J-Braid
Braid is perfect for flipping for bass, working corks for trout, battling shallow reds, and snatching offshore species off the rigs and wrecks, and there are a lot of options on the market. Daiwa’s J-Braid offers all the advantages in a tightly weaved package at a price point that will make you smile.[…]
Fishing
Z-Man Trout Eye Finesse Jigheads
Z-Man’s Trout Eye Finesse Jighead is the logical next step for a line of jigs that has offered a great fishing platform for swim baits.[…]
Crappie/Bream
How to create effective crappie brush piles
When crappie finish their spawning rituals, they head to deeper water and look for two things: Food and cover.[…]
News Breaker
Marsh Man Masson vid: Underfished marsh crawling with redfish
I would rather catch speckled trout than eat a steak, fly in a helicopter or kiss my grandbaby, but this time of year, the specks move far out into the big water, where it can sometimes take live bait and other voodoo to catch them.[…]
Big Bass
Tournament scouting trip yields 11-pound lunker
Stephen Ell and Joe Fleming were scouting for this weekend’s BOSS Tournament Trail championship on May 26 when the fish of a lifetime picked up Ell’s lure.[…]
Apex Predator
Apex Predator: Catfishing with double-baited hooks
One of the most important things when catching catfish is bait selection. After many experiments, I found a double-bait trick that has worked for catching more fish: I use a chunk of fresh cut bait — with the addition of a small pogy on the hook’s tip.[…]
Inshore Fishing
Marsh Man Masson vid: Ridiculous redfish action right now
Try to target any species you want right now in the marshes east of the Mississippi River, and you’ll probably catch those fish. What you’re also sure to land, however, are more redfish than you’ve ever seen in your life.[…]