Plenty of fishing action close to Houma
After being told by a saltwater fishing guide that he would rate the fishing right now as about a three, I wasn’t too sure what to expect this past weekend as I headed toward Cocodrie to fish with LouisianaSportsman.com user Scott Walker. Our plan was to fish Lake Boudreaux just west of Hwy 56 about half way between Chauvin and Cocodrie.
Walker, aka “nightfisher,” told me he had been catching a lot of trout, with a daily limit of redfish throw in, too. Unfortunately, the strong south winds kept us off the water on Saturday, but we were able to make a go of it on Sunday. We found the trout a little stirred up, so we hoped that the redfish would save the day.
What immediately impressed me about Lake Boudreaux was how close it was to Highway 56. Walker didn’t run his big motor more than five minutes before he shut down.
“For anybody that doesn’t want to burn a whole lot of gas, we’re five minutes from the road, and the launch is right there,” Walker said while pointing back to the boat ramp just south of the Boudreaux Canal Bridge from which we launched. “There are a ton of redfish back here.”
Walker began throwing a white Strike King Redfish Magic spinnerbait, while I couldn’t help but take advantage of the calm morning by throwing a chartreuse MirrOlure Top Dog Jr. On my third or fourth cast, a big redfish crushed my topwater, and we had one in the box.
That was my only topwater redfish of the day, though. Walker stuck with his spinnerbait, and he just couldn’t keep the rat reds off of it. He had caught only keepers on it two days before, but he couldn’t buy a keeper bite on it this morning.
I switched to a chartreuse Berkley Gulp Swimming Mullet about a foot under a Bomber Paradise Popper cork and added a second redfish to the box in short order. Walker immediately put down his blade and picked up his popping cork rig with a natural Berkley Gulp shrimp under it.
“They love this natural shrimp back here,” Walker announced as he began popping his three-for-$2 snap-on cork. “When they won’t hit the spinnerbait, they’ll hit this.”
I used the chartreuse Swimming Mullet to add a third keeper to the box before Walker caught his first keeper of the day. However, he put seven more nice reds in the boat before I ever had another bite. And that didn’t include the countless rat reds he caught and released and the few trout that pulled his cork down. As the final fish of our redfish limit was unhooked, Walker saw something floating in the water.
“Look what he’s spitting out – look,” he said. “Crab. They’ve got a lot of crabs back up in here, and that’s pretty much what they’re feeding on right now. That’s why a Gulp works real well.”
Walker’s earlier prediction that we would find the redfish out from the marsh grass rather than right up on it was proven true by the end of our trip. Just about every redfish we caught was about 10 to 15 feet off the grass. Some of the big schools we spotted were on the marsh, but the lone reds were cruising off the bank.
If you’re looking to catch a lot of fish without spending a lot of money, Lake Boudreaux should be near the top of your list. We only scratched the surface by catching the redfish in the broken marsh north of the big lake.
And Walker assured me that there were some big schools of trout out in the open water around the perimeter of Lake Boudreaux.
“You can mess around and catch some good trout in the deeper water here just north of Boudreaux,” Walker concluded. “I caught two over 19 inches two days ago, and we picked up a couple of good ones today.
“The trout bite won’t last that much longer before they move out, but the redfish will be here the rest of spring and throughout summer.”
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