Trout thick at Cocodrie’s Raccoon Island
Kids need action to stay interested.
Put them in a baseball position where they don’t get many balls hit to them, and they’ll start chasing grasshoppers.
Put them in a deer stand with no deer in front of it, and they’ll start noticing how cold they are.
And put a fishing pole in their hands with no fish on the other end of it, and they’ll want to trade their real pole for the Wii fishing rod back home.
My son Matthew plays third base, so there’s no chance of him losing interest in baseball; he’s in the hot corner.
He’s seen some does eating on the food plot the last few times we’ve deer hunted, so maybe that will bring him back to the stand this coming season.
But he’s rarely held a fishing pole with very many fish on the other end of it.
Yeah, he’s landed a big bass or two from the pond. He’s caught his own speckled trout off the Lake Pontchartrain train trestle. And he’s battled a bull red or two down at Delacroix. But he’s never had a fishing trip where he didn’t have to work for everything he caught.
For over a year, I’ve tried to get him on a speckled trout trip that would make his legs limp and his biceps burn.
I wanted him to have some action.
That’s why I got so excited when Capt. Marty LaCoste (985-856-4477) called me to tell me he was smoking the speckled trout down at Raccoon Island.
“We’ve caught 100 fish the last couple of trips even with the bad winds,” he told me. “It’s been one BURN HACK after another.
“Let’s try to pick a day when the wind isn’t up too bad, and y’all come on down.”
BURN HACK is a phrase LaCoste started saying after a customer of his said it all day long while on a charter.
“I didn’t know what he was saying at first,” LaCoste admitted. “But I finally figured it out and started saying it with him. I asked him what it meant, and he told me it meant he was burning up the fish and hacking the fish — just another way of saying he was tearing them up.”
That’s what I wanted. I wanted my son to BURN HACK the trout. So when LaCoste informed me that he was reaching his charter limits by catching trout two at a time on double rigs, I dropped everything and loaded my son and his cousin in the truck at 2:30 in the morning to make the drive down to Bayou DuLarge.
We met up with LaCoste at The Reel Inn fishing lodge on the other side of the levee at the end of LA 315. It was going to take us about 40 minutes to get down to Raccoon Island, and LaCoste wanted to get down there as near as he could to first light.
He wasn’t expecting a lot of other boats because it was a Monday morning. Raccoon Island is an extremely popular fishing destination, but most boats show up on the weekends rather than during the middle of the week.
Even with our early arrival, there were already a few boats fishing around the north side of the island. LaCoste had slammed them on this side a few days earlier, so we started throwing double-rigged ReAction Bayou Chubs.
However, rather than find the fast action he expected, LaCoste landed only one trout. Things just didn’t look right to him, and he didn’t see much bait, so we went around the rocks on the eastern side of the island.
We were met with some large rollers coming off the Gulf of Mexico, so the three of us stayed seated while LaCoste checked the point. He continued to work around to the north side of the rocks where he picked up a couple quick fish.
It was a little rough with the rollers, but LaCoste instructed us on what to do.
“Throw toward that cut to our left and let the current wash your baits down the front of the rocks,” he coached. “I didn’t move my baits at all except for the current taking them, so don’t even work them. Just let them go.”
He was right on the money, but the bite wasn’t nearly as fast as we wanted. I was beginning to feel that familiar realization that this was going to turn into a trip that felt more like work than it did fishing. Something with which my son was all too familiar.
Trying to get out of the rollers, LaCoste moved through the cut to get between the rocks and the beach. The water was a lot calmer in there, and we immediately picked up a single fish. But then LaCoste and I both landed doubles, and he thought we were about to get in some every-cast kind of action.
“I don’t know what happened,” LaCoste lamented when that bite didn’t materialize. “Let’s work down the rocks. Y’all hit the beach, and I’ll work the rocks. We’ll find them. This is the kind of spot where trout gang up tight in one area.
“And when you catch them two at a time, that’s a good sign that there are bunch of fish there. That’s why I can’t believe we didn’t slam them after we caught those doubles.”
A trout here and a trout there did nothing to lift our spirits. That’s when LaCoste and I discussed the possibility that we might have actually been on them back where we caught the doubles.
“Maybe the boat drifted right on top of them,” I offered.
We worked our way back to where we had our first flurry of bites, and sure enough, there they were. LaCoste dropped his Power Pole, and for the next 30 minutes we caught trout on just about every cast. LaCoste estimated that we caught 80 during the peak of the bite.
“Hurry up and keep casting back in there,” he instructed any time he saw one of us unhooking a fish or tying on another double rig. “When they get like this, you’ve got to keep them fired up by keeping your baits in the water. If you give them a break, they’re likely to turn off.”
In fact, that’s one of the main reasons LaCoste throws double rigs this time of year. A fast trout bite can shut down as quickly as it turns on, and double rigs allow him to put as many fish in the boat as fast as he possibly can.
As we slung our last speckled trout into LaCoste’s Blue Wave, I could see my son stretching his arms and rubbing his hands on his shirt. He had a small grimace on his face that was a combination of pain and pleasure.
LaCoste understood that grimace. He and some of his fellow guides had fished the same general area the week before our trip, and he estimated that they had caught over 1,400 fish over the last four or five days.
“It will stay like this all summer long out here at Raccoon Island,” LaCoste added. “We’ll stick with the double rigs with Bayou Chubs in glow/chartreuse, purple/chartreuse and avocado, and we’ve got a new bait we’ve been using that’s the Cajun pepper color.”
As we loaded up to make the run back to The Reel Inn, LaCoste stressed the importance of the lesson we saw first hand. One hundred trout by 9 a.m. didn’t happen by accident. We had to fish around until we found that one spot about the size of a 24-foot bay boat where the fish were stacked up.
“When you come down to Raccoon Island,” LaCoste said, “keep fishing around until you find them. And when the bite slows down, fan cast all around your boat because they can move on you.
“And as you could tell today, if you’re not getting bit in the first few minutes you fish a spot, pick up and move on because the fish aren’t there. They may be there later, but if you aren’t getting bites, you aren’t on the spot. And once you get on them, you can smoke the trout at Raccoon Island all the way to September.”
We laid out the fish on the cleaning table back at the camp, and 100 trout covered from from side to side and end to end. Kids are visual creatures, and I don’t think what kind of day they just had really hit them until they saw the fish on the table.
I had finally got my son on the kind of action it takes to keep kids interested in fishing thanks to LaCoste’s double-rigged Bayou Chubs and Raccoon Island. The last place we fish usually turns into his favorite place to fish, but there’s no doubt that Raccoon Island will stay at the top of his list for quite a while.
Burn hacking speckled trout two at a time for 30 minutes has a way of sticking with you for a while, especially when you’re looking for a lot of action.