Lake Pontchartrain mystifies, marvels, beckons, and teases anglers, but this is the month when she’s usually most generous.
In the days before any European set foot in the New World, the shorelines surrounding Lake Pontchartrain were inhabited by several Native American tribes. Bayougoula, Mougoulacha, Chitimacha, Colapissa, Quinipissalive and the “corn-gatherers,” or Tangipahoa Indians, fished the big lake they called “Okwa-ta,” the wide water.
Even then the lake wasn’t very deep, but what it lacked in depth it more than made up for in bounty, and those early inhabitants survived from its variety and abundance of fish, crabs, shrimp and clams. Unfortunately, relatively little is known of those tribes, and almost all they left behind were mounds of clamshells, evidence of their affinity for the rubbery mussels.
It wasn’t until 1699 that the French explorer, d’Iberville, first caught sight of Okwa-ta, and hung the name Lake Pontchartrain on it, after the then French Minister of Marine, Louis Pontchartrain. I guess it’s not a bad name, but if I knew the word’s etymology, I’d bet it meant something like “flirty, fickle woman,” because that best describes the changeable lake.
It’s a teaser, a mocker and a flirt. It’s a sultry temptress who winks and beckons, inviting your advances, only to slap away any hand you extend toward her. She’s a vixen who seems to actually take delight in dashing your hopes and expectations. At the same time, the sultry Okwa-ta has been known to be very generous.
But the angler who dares to challenge her, to harvest of her aquatic abundance, has to deal with her moods.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that the Fickle Lady hasn’t dealt very generously with me down through the years. For whatever reason, the two of us never really hit it off very well.
But while she gives me the cold shoulder, I’ve seen her favor some anglers above all others, yielding to them, her favored few, huge speckled trout and doormat flounder.
But she gives these gifts only to her favorites, her darlings, her pets. And to the rest of us, the unfavored, she can be extremely miserly.
Many has been my trip into the Wide Water that yielded little or nothing. Oftentimes, I’ve heard glowing reports of tremendous catches coming from the lake, and allowed my hopes to really soar, only to have them come crashing down to earth again after yet another disappointing trip.
If anyone has caught the eye of fickle Okwa-ta and become one of her favorites, it’s Dudley Vandenborre of Deadly Dudley fame. Vandenborre grew up on the banks of the wide water, and was introduced to her charms as a child. For some reason, the lake took a shine to him and has, over time, revealed to him her secrets.
But I’ve learned a few secrets of my own, one of which is, if Okwa-ta doesn’t really like you, then fish in the boat of someone she does like, and maybe, just maybe, she’ll warm up to you a little.
Anyway, that was my plan and it seemed like a good one when I set up a trip to fish the wide water with Vandenborre. He also invited Capt. C.T. Williams of Bigfish TV along, and the three of us set out to see what the lake would offer.
Vandenborre fishes out of a 24-foot Skeeter, pushed by Yamaha’s 225 four-stroke, but he was in the process of switching to the new year’s model and wound up having to borrow the Reno Skiff of his longtime friend and V&G Lures partner, A.D. Geoghegan.
A light fog and a very calm lake greeted us, and Dudley pointed the big skiff toward the Twin Spans.
Mere minutes later, he killed the outboard and dropped the trolling motor over, and we began the process of working along the legs of the bridges.
By now, most Southeast Louisiana anglers are probably aware of the original, straight-tailed Deadly Dudley soft plastic lure. Years of trolling and casting along the bridges led him to develop that bait, and its success in attracting lake trout and flounder made it a hot item at tackle stores throughout the region.
Later, Vandenborre developed a paddle-tail version of the bait, which he called a Terror Tail. It was intended to produce a more life-like swimming action when the bait is retrieved.
Lately, Vandenborre has been busy developing new baits, and has recently introduced a topwater bait, a soft-plastic shrimp, and a new version of the paddle-tail he calls a Redeye. The new Redeye bait was designed with the largest paddle-tail possible, Vandenborre said, without causing the bait to simply spin in circles on the line.
“I wanted a soft-plastic lure that would make a lot of commotion under the water and create as much vibration as possible while still swimming true when you retrieve it,” he explained. “I designed it specifically for that purpose. If you make the paddle-tail any bigger, the bait will just spin on the line. So the tail is the absolute maximum size you can have and still have a bait that swims upright.”
We had Redeyes in a whole variety of colors to fish with, and after snaking them on a 3/8-ounce jighead, we went into action. Williams and Vandenborre staked their claim on the front of the boat, while I took my perch on the rear deck, and we began the serious business of casting and retrieving.
The techniques for fishing along the legs of the bridges are pretty well known to lake anglers. There are several keys to fishing here successfully, and the first one is getting your bait to the bottom.
The other keys won’t matter if you don’t get this one, so the first issue involves weight. Use enough weight to get all the way to the bottom. Some anglers use sliding-sinker rigs tipped with live minnows or market bait. Others, like Vandenborre, use a cast-and-retrieve method that bounces a soft plastic bait off the bottom and skips it up just enough to keep it from tangling in the debris that’s scattered all over the bottom. Too much weight, and you’ll snag the bottom more often. Too little weight and your bait will flow away in the current and never get to the bottom.
Vandenborre says a 3/8-ounce jighead is just right. He buys them by the hundreds — plain, round-headed, unpainted jigs with a short shank hook.
The second key is almost as important — keeping the slack out of your line.
“These fish don’t always bite aggressively,” Vandenborre said. “Sometimes they’ll put the bait in their mouth and spit it out again almost in one motion. If there is any slack in your line, you won’t even feel it. They’ll bump it ever-so-slightly, and sometimes all you can feel is some slight resistance on the end of your line when you lift your rod tip upwards That’s when you set the hook. But if you have a big ol’ belly in your line, one fish after another could be inhaling and exhaling your bait on every cast, and you wouldn’t even know it.”
The third key is color. The traditional wisdom is to fish with bright colors on bright days. Glow, clear, chartreuse, pink, or any combination of those colors would be considered bright.
And likewise, darker colors are for cloudy, gray-skied and overcast days, and for days when the water is stained or simply not up to its usual clarity.
Avocado, smoke, purple, black and other such similar colors are considered dark, and thus fitting for use on darker days.
But remember, the lake is moody and fickle. Conventional wisdom doesn’t always hold true here, and anglers should be willing to break from tradition and try anything on any given day.
Vandenborre definitely believes that color can make a difference. Not always, to be sure. When you find the fish in a feeding frenzy, you can throw any bait of any kind and any color and the fish will attack it.
But sometimes, especially when Okwa-ta is in one of her finicky moods, switching colors can be the ticket to success. And Vandenborre says his blue moon color transcends the bright/dark limitations, and works well under any conditions, and though designed particularly with trout in mind, it works equally well for flounder.
On this particular day, Vandenborre said the avocado color had been especially productive, so I went with that. Now, I’ve got to say that it’s hard to fish behind Vandenborre. He’s fished these bridges for so long and has become so efficient at it, it’s like fishing behind a human vacuum cleaner.
He hits every leg of the bridge with his casts, bypassing nothing, and being positioned in the front of the boat, he gets first dibs at any fish anywhere in the vicinity. Plus, Okwa-ta likes him, and willingly yields to him her bounty.
Me? Not only did I have to play mop-up position standing in the rear of the boat, but Okwa-ta never did like me, even though I’ve never figured out what I did to offend her.
But that didn’t prevent me from catching the first fish of the day, a very respectable flounder. And a few minutes later, I caught another one, almost identical to the first.
I was beginning to think that maybe Okwa-ta and me were coming to an understanding.
Then Williams started to get in on the action. His rod bent double, and his cameraman shot the action as he reeled in another fine flatfish.
“The flounder are showing up in good numbers right now,” Vandenborre quipped. “These aren’t the 5-, 6- and 7-pound doormats like the ones we catch in the fall, but they’re very respectable sizes, and the sheer number of them makes up for the size.”
As though he needed to illustrate his point, Vandenborre reeled in another flounder to add to our growing collection.
We wound up moving around, jumping from one bridge to another in search of some speckled trout. We tried several places along the Twin Spans, then hopped to the Highway 11 Bridge and then over to the Train Trestle. The flounder were willing to cooperate, and Vandenborre, Williams and I all added more to the ice chest, but Okwa-ta was being stingy with the trout.
Every time we passed under the bridges, we noticed the water was slightly deeper just under the various spans. The median depth of the lake is under 15 feet, and mostly along the bridges it averages about 11 feet. But as you pass under the bridges, the bottom drops to about 12 to 13 feet, just a foot or more deeper, but we also noticed that the flounder liked to set up just along that slight dip.
We found that they weren’t holding up tight against the pilings either, but rather were almost in the middle, in-between the pilings and just under the bridges where the bottom dips slightly.
By casting in there, and letting the bait skip off the bottom, keeping our lines tight, we were able to put flounder after flounder in the boat. I also noticed that Williams and I lost a lot of tackle to bottom snags, two or three times the amount that Vandenborre lost.
But he has that skip-thing down pat, lifting his rod and bouncing his bait up just enough to skip it along the bottom as we trolled, without snagging.
I tried to imitate his technique, and found that I didn’t snag quite as often. I figure if I fish the bridges a thousand more times, I’ll get it down pat too.
Also, Vandenborre insists that the west side of the bridges will always produce more flounder than the east side, so if you’re targeting flounder, take heed. Like I said, Okwa-ta tells him her secrets.
Vandenborre also said that the annual run of big trout is about to begin along the bridges.
“It’s just going to happen, any day, like turning on a switch,” he said. “We’ll fish one day and catch five or ten fish, another day ten or fifteen fish, and then the next day, WHAM! We’ll limit out, and all the fish will be big. Five- and 6-pound trout will be common, and 7- and 8-pound fish will show up in the mix. And I won’t be surprised to see 9- and even 10-pound trout this year. In fact, I’ll be disappointed if I don’t.
“And you fish the big trout exactly the same way we fished today.”
Most of the savvy lake anglers really believe that the next record-breaking trout is going to come from Okwa-ta — the Wide Water, Lake Pontchartrain.
Perhaps it will. If it does, it’ll likely be caught by one of Okwa-ta’s favorites. But who knows, she might take a shine to you, and yield to you a real prize, a wall-hanger, even a record breaker.
Hey, it could happen! The lake holds some huge trout, and this could be your year.
I doubt if it’ll be mine. Okwa-ta doesn’t like me. And I don’t think she likes Williams either.
Capt. Dudley Vandenborre can be reached at (985) 847-1924.