Fishing
Closing the Gap
A huge gap exists between amateurs and professionals in most sports.[…]
Fishing
Contents
Bayou Bienvenue is BACK!
Everybody wondered if the fishing action around Bayou Bienvenue could ever recover. Like so many other fishing areas in Southeast Louisiana, Bayou Bienvenue was adversely affected by the BP oil spill and the opening of the Bonnet Carre spillway.[…]
Inshore Fishing
Great Wall is amazing
The Great Wall is almost 2 miles long and runs across the St. Bernard marsh, blocking the MRGO (Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, or Ship Channel), Bayou Bienvenue and the ICW (Intracoastal Waterway).[…]
Contents
Red Storm
It is your classic good-news/bad-news tale. The good news is there are more red snapper around the oil rigs in the northern Gulf of Mexico today than ever before, and they are much bigger than they have ever been.[…]
Columns
Do we have a tiger by the tail?
Louisiana is a shrimp-crazy state. Until being battered by cheaper imports, shrimp fisheries were the backbone of the economies of many coastal communities. The value of the fishery dwarfed the others.[…]
Bass Fishing
Crankbait Campaign Trail
This one leans to the left; that one goes far right. Here’s one that keeps a centrist course.[…]
Bass Fishing
Don’t lose your cool — or your lure
About the only thing on a lake’s bottom that never gets tired of biting is the bottom itself. Particularly with moving “reaction” lures like crankbaits, snags are practically an assumption.[…]
Bass Fishing
A few considerations
Anglers often try idling around a snag to try and free their bait from different angles. If this fails and you have to use a lure knocker, make sure to return to the same angle as the initial snag. This is a simple task if you’re dealing with a log or laydown in shallow water.[…]
Bass Fishing
Wind and tide two main variables
One of the most important considerations for heading to fish the Caernarvon area is just how quickly conditions can change.[…]
Bass Fishing
Hit the high-percentage spots
One of the things that BASS Elite Series professional angler Clark Reehm kept pointing out over and over as he discussed bass fishing around Delacroix was fishing what he called high-percentage places.[…]
Columns
The Gold Mine
If you fish the famed Sulfur Mine in Galliano, you likely won’t find any gold, but you will find lots of silver and bronze. This old industrial mine site is a perfect place to take your kayak for limits of wintertime specks and reds.[…]
Columns
Stop before you clean it
Strip… strip… strip.
My mind was setting the cadence for a very slow retrieve of my weighted fly. Holding to the bottom meant that any change in the slack between rod tip and water would either be fish or snag.[…]
Inshore Fishing
Construction of second artificial reef in Lake Pontchartrain begins
Construction of a new Lake Pontchartrain artificial reef built from debris from the old Interstate 10 Twin Span bridges that were damaged during Hurricane Katrina was begun last week (Dec. 21), with the pile of concrete being named after a well-known lake guide and his wife.[…]
Inshore Fishing
Delacroix trout smackdown continues
It was drizzling when I stepped out of my truck at Sweetwater Marina early Monday (Dec. 5), the first signs of a front that was barreling through the state. I just shook my head, wriggled into my rain suit and headed to meet the two guys I’d be fishing with that morning.
I had told Scott Walker that I didn’t want to waste a day out of the office because I was slammed, and he had promised me it wouldn’t take long to fill our limits of speckled trout.
His confidence was more than braggadocio: I was back at the dock barely more than two hours later, loading up an ice chest full of speckled trout and heading back to the office.[…]
Bass Fishing
Yellow Magic
Sixty-year-old Texan Butch Ray can relate to the buzz heard for months this year around Toledo Bend and on Southwest Louisiana waters about a high-end topwater bait with a beautiful body and a seductive sound.[…]
Columns
This perch is a hussy
Sometimes we can’t help but assign human traits to other creatures, no matter how scientifically incorrect it is. So it is with the green sunfish, Lepomis cyanellus.[…]