Gulp! Alive! crickets put goggleye, bream in the boat.
I guided the boat toward the location canal deep in the southern reaches of the Atchafalaya Basin, memories of one of the most-exciting goggleye trips in my life running through mind.
That trip two years ago with buddy Darren Cooper had produced 60 or so big warmouth on bass tackle, but on this day (Friday, Aug. 12) I was taking my son Garrett and father Allen to the hole to see if the fish were still thick.
Honestly, I was worried. The water was less than pretty as my old jump boat skipped across Flat Lake, and it didn’t get any better as we left the main lake. If anything, it was worse.
One quick stop without a nibble proved that we could have a problem.
But we started to see a change as we slid around a corner and idled into the canal. Here, the water was beautiful.
Garrett and I picked up little spinners, hoping to load the boat quickly. My dad, being old school, had a slip cork rigged on an ultralight on which he already had threaded a cricket onto the hook.
Garrett soon stuck a feisty goggleye, wrestling the unwilling fish into the boat.
“First blood!” he crowed, smirking at his father.
The words were barely out of his mouth when my father, sitting on the back deck hooted and set the hook.
I smiled, but knew if I didn’t catch a fish quickly it was going to be miserable.
The next couple of fish were boated by Dad, and he kept count. Loudly.
After a goggleye wrenched itself off my father’s hook, Garrett set the rules.
“That doesn’t count!” he said. “Only fish that you get in the boat count.”
We laughed, and I finally hooked a warmouth and put it in the ice chest.
Garrett and I were working the flooded cypress with the spinners, but it was soon apparent that we had two choices: Switch to crickets or listen to Dad bragging about how he was spanking us.
Of course, the latter really wasn’t a choice, so we were soon pitching out live crickets and adding fish to the box.
The canal was full of bream. The clean water seemed to be one key.
Equally important, however, was fishing the left side of the canal because it was a bit deeper.
And then I remembered something I had put in the boat almost as an afterthought: Fake crickets.
Yep, little crickets molded of rubber or some such stuff.
Berkley had mailed the Gulp! Alive! crickets to me months ago, and my wife and I had laughed about them. I honestly didn’t think there was much use for them.
But I figured I might as well try them out, so I opened the container and fished one of the little baits out of the Gulp liquid.
They smelled awful, but it didn’t take long for my cork to disappear. When I tossed the fish into the box, the cricket was still on my hook.
And soon it had attracted another strike.
I caught fish after fish on that single fake cricket. It even lasted through some trips into tree limbs.
All the while my dad kept fishing the real deal – and he was constantly taking time out of his fishing to shake out a live cricket and thread it on his hook.
Garrett, who had fallen for the fake cricket, and I were catching fish, throwing them in the box and casting our rigs out much more quickly.
The little Gulp! Alive! Crickets were pretty impressive.
Another part of our success was the slip-cork-rigged ultralights we used. Garrett and I began fishing crickets on graphite jig poles, but Dad was able to put his bait in places we just couldn’t reach.
Once we switched over to slip corks on short ultralights, however, our success increased.
While we caught a lot of chunky goggleye, there were a fair number of bream mixed in. However, the bream were as skinny as we had ever seen.
The only downside of the day was the heat: It was oppressively hot.
Finally, at 1 p.m., we had had enough and headed back to the launch with nearly 60 chunky bream cooling in the ice chest.
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