It always amazes me how few boats I see on Lake Pontchartrain outside of April and May. Take a recent trip I took with Eric Dumas for instance. We basically had the entire train bridge to ourselves except for the big trout that kept attacking our live shrimp.
Dumas has created quite a stir recently on the www.louisianasportsman.com message boards by posting reports and pictures of all the big trout he and his friend Chas Champagne catch near the Rigolets. Some visitors simply think it’s all bogus, but others press Dumas to find out where and what he’s doing.
I met Dumas just the other day at the Rigolets Marina in Slidell as he was getting finished loading his baitwell with some frisky live shrimp that looked big enough to slap on the grill. In the predawn darkness, he told me our plan was to fish the trestle until the falling tide quit. Then we’d have to put in our time until the tide came back in.
“That’s one of the keys to catching fish out here this time of year,” said Dumas. “You’ve got to get here early to catch that water moving out. I usually check out the WWL tide charts and have learned that whatever it says it will generally be 3 hours ahead of that time here. For example, if their chart said high tide is at 11 a.m., then I figure it will be at 8 a.m. here”
After arriving at the west side of the trestle in the 50-piling range, Dumas positioned his boat a good cast length off the bridge, and instructed me to throw my live shrimp rigged under a slip cork to my right. The falling tide caught my rig and swept it toward the Northshore parallel to the trestle. It was difficult to see, but I could view it well enough to know that it disappeared after moving only about 10 feet.
This early-morning bite lasted until the tide slowed to a crawl then stopped. We bided our time by fishing the Bayou Lacombe rigs, but we found each loaded with four or five boats. We tried the Highway 11 bridge, and picked up a few fish before Dumas noticed that the water was starting to come back into the lake.
We went back to the same area of the trestle that produced so well earlier that morning, but this time Dumas tied off to the trestle rather than set up out away from it. He pointed out the current lines coming through the pilings, and showed me where the current line broke about 20 yards to the west of the trestle.
“I can’t tell you how many fish I’ve caught like this right in front of people who ask me what I’m doing different,” Dumas said. “They have the same bait under the same slip cork, but they never notice that I’m casting away from the bridge during the rising tide while they’re casting to it.”
The trout weren’t quick to pick up on the slip-cork shrimp, so Dumas started heaving out a couple Carolina-rigged shrimp to see if they were on the bottom. On the bottom they were as Dumas and I started reeling in trout after trout with the largest reaching about 4 pounds.
“You can do this all summer long,” Dumas said as we idled back into the marina later that day with a box full of good trout. “We didn’t connect with the 5- or 6-pound fish that we were looking for, but that’s fishing. We’re about four days after the full moon, so they’re probably already off, but they’ll come back. And when they do, I’ll be right here with them. The funny thing is that I won’t have much company.”
