When Captain Marty LaCoste skirted Lake Mechant, I had to wonder what was going on.
“I got a little canal up here north of Mechant; I think we can smoke ‘em in there,”LaCoste explained. “We can catch some fish in the lake, but I think these are going to be bigger.”
Two hours and 100 trout later, I commended LaCoste for making the right call.
As we arrived at LaCoste’s little unnamed canal, he was a little leery at first. The water was at a standstill, and he thought we needed the tide to start falling to really smack the trout. We got to work anyway, and picked up a fish here and there.
With us was one of LaCoste’s fishing buddies Jason Powers from Metairie, and he started filling the box by fishing a chartreuse-colored MirrOlure MirrOdine. LaCoste had been smoking his fish on a Tsunami swimbait, so he started with that. And just to be different, I grabbed a DOA that was dangling under a rattling cork.
Powers had the definite upper hand at the start, but LaCoste slowly started picking up a few on his Tsunami. Rather than fishing it fast through the water, LaCoste could only get bit by letting his bait go all the way to the bottom before reeling it back with a very slow and steady retrieve. Popping or bumping it off the bottom just wasn’t working.
We turned a corner off the main canal into a side canal, one we could see the dead end in the back, and my rattling cork started going under. The tide still wasn’t moving, though, and LaCoste said we would have to wait for it to start pulling out to catch the bigger trout.
“We were on this bank yesterday, and we didn’t start smoking them until the tide started falling,” he added. “But it looks like the water’s starting to move a little bit, so let’s stick around and see what happens.”
Soon, all three of us switched to the Tsunami Swim Baits, although I alternated it with the new Marsh Works 4-inch Bayou Thumper, and we mimicked each other’s retrieve – slow and steady on the bottom. The MirrOdine and DOA bites had disappeared earlier, and Powers and I realized that we would have to change if we wanted to keep pace with LaCoste.
Although all the water in the canal that looked exactly the same, we caught the majority of our trout in about a 150-yard stretch of water. The farther we went back into the canal the fewer bites we got. The best description of where we caught our fish would be the middle from the mouth to the back.
And, as LaCoste had predicted, our trout got bigger when the water really started moving. The solid trout were up to 2 1/2 pounds, and they all looked identical as we swung them into LaCoste’s new Skeeter.
We were done at 8:30 a.m. with 75 fish in LaCoste’s boat and 25 more caught by Travis Miller, another of LaCoste’s fishing partners, who was fishing right beside us for most of the morning.
“The crazy thing is the trout really aren’t in here good yet,” LaCoste surmised as we packed up for the run back in. “These dead-end canals are only going to get better in the next few weeks.”
For more information or to book a trip with Absolute Fishing Charters and Captain Marty LaCoste call 985-856-4477 or visit http://www.absolutefishingcharters.com/.
