Tie on a Carolina rig, and watch your bream catches go way up on Toledo Bend.
Boats were stacked up in the protected bay, anglers in each one diligently watching corks for any sign that a fish had swallowed their baits. They were out of the force of wind found on the main lake, but a light chop was still evident.
Mike Cortelloni didn’t give those fisherman a second look as he idled past them, heading farther into San Miguel to a cove that blocked the wind completely.
“You want to find calm water,” the veteran Toledo Bend bass and bream guide said. “Bream look for sheltered water because they’ll get blown off the beds in that wind. They can’t stay on the beds.”
This isn’t where he usually fishes this time of year. Cortelloni prefers fishing in the main lake, but a front had blown through the day before, and the wind was atrocious.
“You can find big bream anywhere on the lake, but there are more numbers in the main lake,” he explained. “You can go on the main lake and find hundreds of beds.
“You can fish them out, and go back the next day and there’ll be more.”
That was hard for a family from South Louisiana to believe. We usually work trees, stumps and laydowns along the banks in our part of the state. Cortelloni, however, insisted the main lake is best on Toledo Bend.
“When you get out on the main lake and find one of those beds with hundreds of bream on it, even on a slow day, you can catch 70 or 80,” he said. “You can catch them as long as you can stay on the bed.”
Unfortunately, my family and I would have to settle for those fish holding next to the banks — the wind was just too rough on the main lake.
As he talked, Cortelloni tossed out his favorite bream-catching rig next to a fallen log and almost instantly set the hook.
The hand-sized panfish put up a valiant fight, but was soon flipped into the boat.
Cortelloni quickly tossed the fish into the livewell and threaded another cricket onto the hook before casting again.
The rig is a simple outfit, although probably more familiar to bass anglers than panfishermen. In essence, it is a Carolina rig, which means that the weight is located well above the hook to allow the bait to float above the bottom.
The weight is simply a split shot or two pinched on the line 12 to 14 inches above the hook.
There’s no swivel like bass anglers use on their Carolina rigs.
“I use just enough weight to sink it and still be able to cast it,” Cortelloni said. “Usually a No. 5 split shot does it.”
My wife eyed the contraption with some skepticism. You see, Yvette is a dyed-in-the-wool cane-pole fisherman — if you have to do more than flip a cricket or worm out and watch a cork to catch a fish, she isn’t usually really interested in catching it.
She would have to adjust on this trip because Cortelloni was supplying all the equipment, and there wasn’t a cane pole on the boat.
The guide only smiled at Yvette’s hesitation.
“I promise you, if you get in a good bed and the bream are active, it doesn’t get down,” Cortelloni said. “By the time you cast out and click (the bail), they’re swimming down on it.”
He would simply cast it out, let the weight settle to the bottom and jerk it along until he got a hit.
After he boated a couple of fish, Yvette’s doubts began to dissipate and she reached for Cortelloni’s favorite bait for the technique.
“Crickets are the primary bait,” he explained. “Some people use worms, but day in, day out, crickets are going to out-perform anything else.”
The key to the technique is that the bait essentially is weightless in the water.
“That weight goes down to the bottom, but the cricket stays up a good while,” he said. “It lets the cricket float and wiggle above the grass and other structure.”
The slowly sinking insect drives bream crazy.
Cortelloni admitted that the technique was similar to tightlining with a tube jig or Beetle Spin, but he insisted that his junior Carolina rig would be more productive.
“You can use a jig, but I’m going to wear you out,” he said. “I’m going to two-to-one you all day long.”
Five-year-old Gabrielle eyed the insect in her mother’s hand carefully and looked prepared to leap from the boat if the cricket wiggled free and jumped her way.
But Yvette expertly threaded the bug onto the small hook and prepared to cast it toward the bank. Gabrielle settled into her mother’s lap to help.
It took a couple of casts for Yvette to get the outfit near a small log, but once she did the line quickly began to move to the side.
“Set the hook,” Cortelloni instructed. “One just picked it up.”
The two girls worked the fish in tandem — Yvette holding the rod, and Gabrielle frantically turning the handle on the little Zebco 303.
There was no more discussion about whether the technique worked.
We continued to probe the shoreline of the little cove, casting toward the bank and picking up fish scattered around isolated grass patches, stumps and fallen trees.
That’s when we hit the motherlode of the day — a small stick protruding from the water’s surface. The stick was attached to a fallen log, but the fish were thick around the isolated piece of structure in about 2 feet of water.
Cortelloni was first to cast to the stick, and his line instantly zipped to the side as a fish picked up the hook-impaled cricket.
“Cast over there,” he told me as he flipped a hand-sized bluegill into the boat.
My cricket had barely been dragged beneath the surface of the water when my line screamed to the right. We were in a bed.
The rest of my family, Yvette and Gabrielle working together and son Garrett on a fourth rod, quickly got into the act and we all took turns tossing crickets to the stick.
We caught half a dozen fish off that little stick. If they slowed down, we would move away and come back in a few minutes. There would be more territorial fish waiting.
When the wind finally died down about mid day, Cortelloni ordered lines to be pulled up for a short run into the main lake to look for some bigger fish.
About three minutes later, he shut the engine down and told me to start looking at the bottom of the clear water for beds.
“You start looking for them in coves (on the main lake) on the points,” he said.
Polarized sunglasses, which cut the glare of the sun and allow anglers to see more clearly through the water, are a must for finding beds.
It didn’t take long.
“All of those light-colored spots are beds,” Cortelloni explained.
It was incredible. The bottom of the water all around the boat was littered with those “light-colored spots.” Some were a few feet in diameter, while others looked to be as large as Cortelloni’s Skeeter.
“The bream come in and fan the grass out of the way,” he said.
If the water is clear enough, the fish can actually be seen moving around the beds, but it’s usually the absence of grass that gives away the spawning areas.
“You can usually see the beds shining up through the water because it’s sandy,” Cortelloni said.
The water here was deeper, so we had to wait longer for our crickets to reach the bottom.
Obviously, more weight could be added to make the outfit fall more quickly, but Cortelloni didn’t add more weight. Instead, he made long casts past the bed and let the weight drag his cricket back into the bare spot.
Once the bait reached the bottom, the technique was the same as in the protected creek — he jerked the weight to prompt the cricket to wiggle, waited a few seconds, jerked the weight, waited a few seconds.
Fishing in these deep-water areas is normal this time of year, Cortelloni said.
“In the early spring, they are in the creeks, but in late spring and on into summer, they move out here on the main lake,” he said.
There are numerous places to look for these fish-packed beds, Cortelloni said.
On the south end of the lake, the most productive areas are in the mouths of Six Mile and Housen creeks on the Texas side, he said.
Mid-lake hotspots include the San Miguel, San Patricio, the 1215 and Patroon areas, while Converse Bay and Tenaha Bayou areas in the north are traditionally productive.
The fish apparently had moved off because of the front, so we only managed to catch a couple of chinquapin before heading back to the launch.
That was fine with us — we already had a beautiful stringer of bream for the dinner table and a new technique to try back home in the Atchafalaya Basin.
Editor’s note: This story is a Louisiana Sportsman classic. It first appeared in the June 2000 issue.
