Forget the expensive long hauls and learn where Lake Borgne trout, reds and drum stack up within minutes of the launch. And then watch a parade of fish hit the ice.
“Settling up” after fishing trips wasn’t always an ugly affair, especially among lifelong friends.
But here we were on the shores of Lake Catherine on the deck of Doc’s new “camp” (right! — like Grosse Savanne is also called a “camp!”), bickering and digging in our wallets to settle up after a trip to mid-Breton Sound that left from this very dock a week earlier.
“Three hundred eighty-five bucks wortha gas!” Artie kept gasping. “On top of da 300 live shrimp! You gotta be outcha mind!”
The catch (19 specks among four of us) made it all the more galling. The gals rubbed in the humiliation by stressing — between snickers — how they’d caught more white trout under the dock lights the night before than the total of fish we’d caught in the middle of Breton Sound!
And their whites weren’t much smaller than our specks. And all were caught on plain “maaaw-ket” bait.
At any rate, there was no denying the figures. They added up. Eddie’s “pre-law” was accounting, which came in handy after three disbarments. So the fiduciary matter was finally settled, if somewhat acrimoniously.
“Look, gang,” Artie concluded. “Gas ain’t getting any cheaper. These long-haul fishing trips ain’t getting any cheaper. And I ain’t getting any richer. Ya follow me? Ya ‘unnerstan’ what I’m saying? How ’bout something a bit closer this week?”
The rest of us didn’t need much coaxing. We were within spitting distance (boat-ride-wise) of Lake Borgne’s major “chokepoints” of Bayou Thomas, Chef Pass and Martello Castle.
When the shrimp and crabs start funneling through them in midsummer, the fishing can be fantastic. Specks, white trout, bull reds, bull croakers, channel mullet, puppy drum, sheepshead — all converge over these oyster-studded channels for an easy feast.
On a good trip with clean water and falling tide, you might catch a nice sampling of all these species (usually heavy on the white trout.)
But, otherwise, even under lousy conditions, one or the other of these species usually take up the slack in these deep passes. So you go home with enough for a fish fry.
If not? Well there’s the shallower waters of Lake Borgne nearby. Watch for birds, and trout (both specks and white) are often under them — but, yes, usually mixed with the inevitable gafftops and ladyfish!
Plus, there’s always the fallback option of cork fishing in the marsh bordering the lake for flounder and reds.
One way or the other you’ll probably come home with fish, and probably more than we caught on our mid-Breton trip — and for a tiny fraction of the cost.
All this suddenly seemed like a no-brainer, we said to each other while slapping our foreheads V-8 commercial-style along with each other’s backs. What were we thinking? Yes, the “settling up” was finished, the keg tapped, the wine corks popped — and spirits were rising on the deck of Doc’s “camp.”
So naturally the relative merits of Les Miles vs. Nick Saban came up as conversation starter — just as Spencer walks in with his CCA cap in brilliant red.
But seeing it Artie saw worse than red. He saw Crimson, as in Tide — the title, as luck would have it, of the magazine on Doc’s coffee table that Artie noticed when turning his head.
“Whoooo-boy!” I thought. “Here we go!”
Remember Mikey Corleone’s face when he returned from the restaurant’s bathroom with the gun ready to blow away Solazzo and McCluskey? Remember how he sat down and his eyes started going crazy?
Better yet, remember Sonny Corleone’s face when he got the call from his sister Connie that Carlo was slapping her around again?
Well, compared to Artie the Corleones looked like Jimmy Stewart smiling at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Pelayo rolled his eyes and tugged my elbow in warning. Eddie, Priscilla and Trisha looked over, grimacing. But a smiling Doc, walking in with a fresh round of drinks, seemed oblivious to the ticking time bomb on his camp deck.
On the Breton Sound trout odyssey, Artie and Spence were too close for comfort — both were on Doc’s boat. Artie cast under the birds, as we crossed Lake Borgne, his cork plunged, and he started tussling with a hefty fish, whooping in delight.
“Told you big reds also hang out under da birds!” he bellowed two or three times during the brawl, as the drag on his Mitchell 300 sang its sweet music and the rest of us looked at each other smirking.
With the fish almost at boatside we all noticed the slime on Artie’s line.
“Coulda told ya!” Pelayo started to laugh just as Artie looked down and exploded in rage.
It sounded like ….
You know Roger Daltrey’s scream near the end of “Won’t Get Fooled Again?” Right before, “meet the new boss — same as the old boss?” Well, Artie somehow surpassed it — in fact, he somehow surpassed his own scream of anguish at the end of the LSU-Bama game in 2012.
No one thought such a thing possible.
The gafftop probably went 6 pounds. Artie’s bellow was still echoing in the background when he reached for the sidearm he’d been showing off all morning.
“Self defense,” he kept saying as he waved it around. “Dem pelicans are getting out of hand. Vicious suckas will attack you right in your boat — to say nothing of around the cleaning tables! Be prepared, I always say.”
The thing was only a .177-calibre CO2 pistol, featuring a “clip” with 18 shots — none of which had ever gone near a Pelican.
But now Artie had ready prey. He clicked off the safety, took aim and ….
Remember Bonnie and Clyde at the end of the movie? Remember Sonny Corleone when they cornered him in the toll booth?
Well, Bonnie, Clyde and Sonny all got off easy compared to this poor gafftop. While Artie whooped and popped away at the thrashing gafftop, I looked over at Spencer on the bow, with his CCA cap and fly rod. He didn’t like the scene. His face looked like ….
Remember Doug Neidermeyer’s face in Animal House when he faced down Flounder? “What’s that on your shirt, mister? A P-LEDGE P-IN!”
Well, Spencer didn’t get his nickname way back in the Tigerland days (“Neidermeyer”) for nothing.
“In case you didn’t realize, Artie!” Spencer sneered down from his pedestal. “Gafftops have a place in nature’s balance, too. So no need for that! What a waste!”
“Ain’t no waste,” Artie looked over and laughed. “He has a place alright. He’s going in the crab traps this afternoon. If I recall, you and Priscilla sure didn’t mind the boiled crabs last night. Think I got all of two of them. We’ll have a lot more tonight. Thanks to this gafftop!”
Gotta hand it to Spence, however: Right after the movie came out (which we all saw together about five times, sneaking in the booze same as we snuck it into Death Valley), he heard about his nickname. So during the era’s toga-party craze back in Tigerland he never wore a toga to the parties. Not once. Instead he always came as?
You guessed it: Doug Neidermeyer! Right down to the silver helmet!
Next morning — after a microscopic boat ride, it seemed — we anchored in Lake Borgne at the mouth of Bayou Thomas. Doc and Spence took Doc’s boat and their fly-rods and headed over to do whatever it is people do with those stupid things in the shallow marsh ponds off the ICWW.
Bully for them.
“Let’s set up RIGHT!” Pelayo barked, as Artie grabbed the anchor and looked around.
Pelayo actually sounded like Neidermeyer barking an order.
“Now check the depth gage” he ordered Eddie. “And see when we hit the ledge, when the water changes quickly from about 35 to 8 feet or so. We want to fish the ledge. The fish are all stacked up on the ledge!”
The hellacious currents that run through this area have scoured a pretty deep channel. We watched the depthfinder go from 5 to 10 to — WHOOA! — 20, 30, then 50 feet!
“Hold on — hold ON!” Pelayo cautioned as he jammed the boat in reverse. “OK — drop it!”
Artie slid the anchor over, in an area of 8- to 10-foot depths.
“We’ll all be casting that-a-ways!” Pelayo pointed behind him.
This meant we’d be casting in the direction of the 25- to 30-foot depths — but not actually into those depths. Rather, into the steep ledge where they start descending from 12 feet or so.
Yes, there’s actually a science (of sorts) to this crude-looking bottom fishing.
Three casts into his fishing trip, Pelayo pulled out the second pair of nice frying white trout. So Artie, Eddie and I — who had nothing to show for our casting — finally scrambled to the tackle boxes for heavier jig heads.
You’d think after 40 years of fishing something so basic mighta sunk in earlier. But such is summer fishing. You get in a rut chasing tiny specks under the birds, using popping corks, and it doesn’t occur that bigger specks, along with a ton of white trout and croakers like it much, much deeper at times.
“Look closely at my tandem jigs — half ounce each, see?”
Problem was, with one 3/8-ounce jighead our bait just wasn’t getting to the bottom.
Everyone who grew up in New Orleans remembers “The Chef” as perhaps the area’s premier croaker/white trout hole. This meant fishing deep, in the pass itself or at the mouths of any cuts leading into it. And using dead shrimp-baited hooks above sinkers (how odd that term sounds nowadays for inside fishing).
The mouth of Bayou Thomas, about two miles west of Chef Pass along the Intracoastal, features a similar setting.
Soon, heeding Pelayo’s strict orders, all our poles were rigged with tandem heavy jigs, chartreuse, white and purple.
“Yeah!” Pelayo yelled from the bow, with his rod high overhead as the rest of us made our first casts in this new location. “Just watch!
“Whoops! There’s the second one!” and he seemed to set the hook again.
All eyes were on Pelayo as, whooping like a lunatic, he swung aboard a pair of trout— one white the other a speck (a pattern that appeared often throughout the day).
“Perfect!” he beamed. “Look at ’em! In the old days a speck this size, we’d call a “cigar trout. They were great fried whole — and these will be too!”
If specks, many of the white’s we caught would have been borderline. The kind you smash and stretch against the ruler, reaching for that magic 12. With white trout there’s no such concern (no size or even numbers limit).
And an added treat: White trout have slender, tender bones to begin with. When it’s a small trout, the bones are all the more tender; just a little frying pretty much renders them into mush, which means you can suck the luscious white meat off the backbone without much fear of getting a hard rib bone caught in your throat.
I’d been retrieving slowly while watching Pelayo, and soon I felt a lunge (a white trout really smacks a bait).
“Whoa!” I grunted, and soon I felt another lunge. “Bet I got two!”
But nobody noticed. They were all too busy with their own fish.
Eddie soon swung aboard a white trout, smartly smacking my cheek with the free ½-ounce beetle in the process. And Artie would have swung in two, but one dropped off in his frenzy to get them aboard.
We did away with the shrimp-tipping and it made no difference whatsoever, except for Artie who craved some puppy drum for the grill. He cast back out and reared back the instant he took up the slack. His medium rod bowed deeply.
“Don’t think that’s no white trout or croaker!” Pelayo shouted
“No way!” Artie nodded, as the drag on his vintage Mitchell 300 sang away.
“Bet it’s a puppy drum.” Pelayo smirked from the bow. “They love this channel, too.”
After a five-minute back-and-forth tussle, I slid the net under Artie’s drum — about a 4-pounder.
“We won’t be just frying fish tomorrow folks!” Pelayo roared. “We’ll be grilling some gorgeous fillets on the half shell, too!”
Over half the fish Pelayo was swinging aboard, for some odd reason, were specks.
“Watch where I’m casting,” he smirked when Eddie made the observation and remarked. “See? I’m casting upcurrent, toward the anchor.”
“OK, big deal!” Eddie laughed.
“Now watch,” and Pelayo took up his slack, bounced his rod tip a bit — WHAM!
“There he is!” he said.
And sure enough, another 16-inch speck was soon aboard.
“Gotta theory here,” he said in a professorial tone while chunking his fish in the box. “Trout probably know shrimp don’t swim against a current, at least one this strong. They know such a current usually carries the shrimp with it. So I’m making my jigs do that. Instead of retrieving them against the current, I’m letting them bounce WITH the current, like a shrimp does naturally.”
We all looked around smirking and frowning. But whatever? It sure seemed to work.
No sooner had I put down the net after scooping up another Pelayo trout and picked up my rod, I felt a tap (on my shrimp-tipped jig) and set the hook on something heavy.
“Feels like another drum here!” I grunted.
And in a few minutes Pelayo was returning the favor by netting my 4-pound puppy drum.
Eddie, in the meantime, had followed my advice with shrimp, and he groaned as he heaved aboard a nice red, probably a 4-pounder.
“More for da grill!” he whooped.
This first half hour set the pattern for the next two hours. Literally every cast (with or without shrimp) produced either several hits or a fish — nothing really big, except the few puppy drum and couple of reds — but all great frying.
The box was filling nicely as Pelayo grabbed his buzzing iPhone.
“What’s up, Doc?” he asked. “Yes, the fish fry is definitely ON for tonight.
“So how you and Spence making out with the fly rods? — Ah! thought so!”
He looked over laughing.
“Right, right. Those bogalee bowfishermen wiped out the reds,” Pelayo said. “Whatta buncha tacky low lifes! Probably wearing Duck Dynasty T-shirts in the process!
“Right, right. We’ll discuss it with Artie tonight, over drinks. Should be fun!”
