These are the only four rigs you need for speckled trout fishing, whether you love live bait or swear by artificials.
It was so early in the morning, I couldn’t even see the fluorescent-orange cork that my fishing partner, Eric Dumas, had threaded onto my braided line. I knew it was out there somewhere, but it was well-hidden amongst the inky shadows at the base of the train trestle in eastern Lake Pontchartrain.
“Just watch for it to go under,” Dumas said. “You don’t have to worry about these fish nibbling around on it. They’ll suck it down quick.”
“Fat chance,” I mumbled. “Eric,” I queried, “how am I supposed to watch it go under when I can’t even see it? Are you sure we had to get out here this early? I could have still been in bed dreaming about these lovely ladies rather than out here hoping they pull down a cork I can’t even see.”
Dumas assured me that it would be light enough to see the cork in mere moments, and that in the meantime I should just feel for something tugging on the other end of my line.
Twenty minutes and no tugs later, I finally figured out why Dumas had instructed me to cast my sliding-cork rig toward the south shore. As soon as the bright-orange float settled into the water, it had already moved more than 5 feet toward the north shore.
The current was ripping down the side of the trestle fast enough that even if I could have seen it earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with it. Apparently, Dumas and his good buddy, Chas Champagne, had been stroking some monster trout using the falling tide and a floating cork to their advantage, and Dumas was hoping for more of the same.
