Can’t catch reds out of this popular port? Follow this guide, and you won’t be buying hamburgers and hot dogs for the barbecue pit.
A scouting trip for an upcoming bass tournament turned into quite a different experience Saturday (May 1) when buddy Darren Cooper and I put 60 chunky goggle-eye in the livewell – without putting up the bass gear.
“I just can’t believe we’re catching them like this,” Cooper said several hours after warmouth began pouring into the boat.
The first bites were nothing surprising. Cooper and I were pitching plastics along a flooded tree line on the southern end of the Atchafalaya Basin, and the fish telegraphed themselves with their patented rap-rap-rap.
Cooper landed a couple throwing a worm, and fish were constantly harassing my Baby Brush Hog. But we just sort of laughed it off and finally moved to another area.
As we fished our way into a location canal, I switched to a small craw and almost immediate put a goggle-eye in the boat. Cooper missed several fish on his favorite Culprit worm, but I put several more of the voracious fish in the boat.
“OK, do you have any more of those?” Cooper said, and I threw him one.
From that point on, we pretty much forgot that we were scouting for bass. We were picking up a few goggle-eye, missing the vast majority of bites. But we were having a ball.
And then I ran out of those craws, so I reached into my box and rigged a YUM Big Show Craw. My hook-up ratio sky rocketed.
Soon, Cooper and I were both throwing that craw and jamming more and more fish into the livewell.
The beauty of the Big Show Craw was that it was compact, and the fish didn’t care if the lure had any claws left. In fact, we hooked up with more fish after the claws were pulled off the bait.
“Why are they hitting this?” Cooper asked. “It doesn’t look like anything. It looks like a bullet.”
Now, we certainly didn’t catch every goggle-eye that tapped the bait. It was a never-ending struggle knowing when to set the hook.
“It’s hard not to set the hook,” Cooper laughed. “But you don’t know when to do it.”
The bigger fish would pop the bait and then just swim off – much like a bass. Most just knocked the lure stupid, and we had to guess when it was best to set the hook.
We probably landed only a quarter of the bites we had on our four trips around the canal, but that added up to 60 beautiful fish.
“It’s a blast,” Cooper said. “I just can’t believe we caught so many of them like this.
“I bet we could catch 200 if we had worms or crickets under a cork.”