It’s tough when Mother Nature takes away both of your options at Venice. The wind is keeping anglers off the rigs, and the muddy water is making it tough in the bays. Even with the tough conditions, though, somebody is always going to figure out the trout.
While waiting for some steaks to cook last Tuesday evening, I heard some of the most grizzled Venice veterans contemplating which way we were going to go the next day. They knew the rigs were out because of the projected winds, so they started hammering out the details of which bays we would hit. Before our steaks were medium rare, a storm racing from the north only complicated the matter.
As I stepped into Capt. Allen Welch’s Skeeter ZX24V Bay Boat the next morning at the Venice Marina, it still wasn’t clear where we would go. Capt. Donnie Ray Thomas was driving another boat in our party, a demo 24-foot Nautic Star bay boat that the company had brought down for some testing and evaluation. We headed out each hoping the other would know where to go.
We eventually settled in Garden Island Bay, and headed for a promising shoreline that was full of small pogies flipping around. Welch began heaving a purple/chartreuse V&M Marsh Minnow under a popping cork. It didn’t take long for him to sling the first trout of the day over the gunwale.
I began throwing a chartreuse core-shot Deadly Dudley minnow with a purple inside that Capt. Doc Weiss had given me a few weeks earlier. He told me that this particular bait wasn’t even on the market yet, so I thought the fish might be interested in the new look.
Apparently, it didn’t really matter what bait or color we threw because Welch and I got consistent bites for the next hour or so — Welch sticking with the Marsh Minnow, and me changing between the purple/chartreuse, clear/pin and clear/chartreuse Dudleys and purple/chartreuse Salt Water Assassin Sea Shads.
“When they get like this, I don’t think it matters a whole lot what you use or what color you throw,” said Welch. “These fish are keying on all these pogies, and all I’m trying to do is keep up with the bait as it moves down this shoreline.”
Welch kept the boat positioned about 40 yards off the bank so we could make parallel casts to the bank in the primary feeding zone. This also allowed us to reach any redfish we saw near the canes.
Since we were kind of using this as more of a scouting trip than a trout-slam trip, we eventually started looking around at other areas near Garden Island Bay. Our last stop, at the mouth of Freshwater Bayou, yielded our next little scurry of activity, and we added about 10 more trout to the box.
As evidenced upon our return to the marina, the strong northwest wind and the muddy water had shut down several anglers. Some anglers are always going to figure them out, though, and a couple emptied some nice buckets of fish on the cleaning tables. Thomas came in behind us with a good mess of fish, and we wound up with enough fillets to pass around.
We didn’t get anywhere near a limit of fish, but we did catch enough to call our day a success. And I learned that tough conditions don’t mean the trout stop eating. Find the clearest water you can with lots of bait, and you will catch fish no matter how bad the wind or mud.
Contact Capt. Allen Welch with Hooked Up Charters at 601-799-0110.