The earth is a resilient thing. It has a way of cleansing itself after it inflicts its own devastation, and there’s probably no better example of this than how quickly fishing picks up along the coast of Louisiana after a hurricane.
However, where Capt. Marty LaCoste would have expected to see shrimp and diving birds during late August and early September, he saw no shrimp and only a few flying birds when he inspected the Bayou DuLarge area just days after Hurricane Isaac.
“Nothing but muddy water,” LaCoste said. “I remember back in … Hurricane Humberto, I believe it was, we had nothing but south winds, and it blew fish and bait into Sister Lake. Two or threw days after the storm, we were slamming the trout in Sister, and then we went up to Mechant and Lost Lake to get our reds.”
That wasn’t the case this time, and LaCoste believes it had something to do with just how close Isaac’s eye wall came to Bayou DuLarge.
“What happened with Isaac was the first part of the storm had the north winds,” LaCoste pointed out. “The buoy in Sister Lake was reading -3.8, so it pushed all the water out of DuLarge.
“But when the eye wall passed, we started getting south winds, and the water came up to 4 on the same buoy. So it went from as low as it could go up to 4. But as bad as that might have affected the fishing, I don’t think that was the worst of it.”
That same buoy in Sister Lake that recorded the wildly fluctuating water level also recorded 70 mph winds. In LaCoste’s estimation, that probably pushed 4- and 5-foot waves through the interior lakes.
“I guess how quickly the fishing picks up depends where the storm passed in relation to where you fish,” LaCoste said. “The same day I went out after Isaac and didn’t do anything, a buddy of mine over at Cocodrie went out and caught a limit of 13-inch trout. There were birds diving and shrimp everywhere.”
LaCosted added that he thought any aftereffects from Isaac, even though they lasted longer than he expected, will have cleared up long before anybody decides to head out to try the redfish during October.
