“This year has brought us something in our area that we haven’t had in years,” Mark Prices. “We had a long, cold winter followed by a normal spring.
“Finally, a textbook seasonal fishing year.”
What Price means by that is during most recent years it has been warm and fish moved up shallow by the first of February. Fish were scattered shallow and deep.
But this year it was still freezing some days in the middle of March. That kept fish deep longer than usual on Lake D’Arbonne and made more fish than normal move in to spawn at the same time.
“That means that as late spring and summer gets here, they will be on the traditional post-spawn patterns like the creek channels and grass beds a lot more consistently,” Price said. “The past few years, they’ve been scattered all over the place.”
There also is more cover available this year.
“Something else that we saw coming back, especially up the creeks, is lily pad fields,” Martin Elshout said. “I think we’ll see even more of them this summer, and we will see people catch more and more fish on a frog in May, June and up into July.
“I can remember years ago around the pads when we caught a lot of fish.”
He said the best areas for fishing lily pads are up around the Mixing Hole on D’Arbonne Creek, above the Highway 2 bridge (Bernice highway) and in areas like Stowe Creek.
Because the pads offer great shade and oxygen for the fish, that bite can happen anytime during the day.
“There’s nothing more exciting than seeing those fish swirl and smack a frog around the pads,” Elshout said. “I look forward to doing that more.”
And while Lake D’Arbonne isn’t affected by the tides, the big lake has a huge watershed and late spring rains can raise it as high as five feet sometimes. That causes a big disruption in the fishing, not to mention flooding to some areas of the lake.
But this past fall, a new, $6 million Tainter Gate project was completed by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development to help regulate lake levels better and reduce flooding like area residents have seen in the past.