When a grown man works all day and hears that five-o’clock whistle sound, it won’t be very long before he finds something to put in his mouth and fill up his belly. Unless he’s got a team of servants, he doesn’t just sit in his easy chair and wait for the food to come to him. He seeks it out in his kitchen or favorite restaurant.
Speckled trout are the same way. This time of year, the fish are constantly ravenous as they seek, like grizzly bears, to add fat for the long, lean winter. So they go where the food is, and in the autumn, that means grass beds.
The white shrimp that are leaving Louisiana’s marshes with every falling tide use grass beds to feed and hide from predators, and over the millennia, speckled trout have learned that if they want easy autumn meals, all they have to do is seek out the submerged aquatic vegetation.
So wise anglers who are hunting speckled trout do the same.
Jeff Bruhl, Chris Macaluso and I sure did on a trip to Lake Pontchartrain late last week. We started on the north shore, poking and prodding the mouths of major bayous, and we caught a few fish everywhere we stopped — as long as those areas included eel grass beds.
Eventually, we settled on a grass-carpeted flat on the south shore that was loaded with speckled trout, as well as a few bass and reds, and we proceeded to whack the fish.
Hot baits included Matrix Shad soft-plastics on 1/16-ounce Deathgrip Jigheads as well as Vudu Shrimp.
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