If the November weather’s right, Calcasieu can produce 100 fish a day for those who know the secrets of the lake.
Capt. Frank Moore (504-887-4960) has been whacking the trout the past couple days out in Breton Sound even with the huge tidal ranges the coast has been having lately.
“We’ve got an enormous tidal range right now,” Moore said. “It usually gets up to 2 feet then goes down, but we’re up past 2.5. It was 2.8 the other day, and we had to make some adjustments to stay on the fish.”
The reason Moore had to adjust is because all the trout he’s catching are right on the bottom around the big rigs out by Central in 15 to 20 feet of water. If he gets his bait even as little as 6 to 8 inches off the bottom he gets in what he called the junk.
“When it got up to 2.8, I had to go to a 1-ounce weight on my Carolina rig,” Moore explained. “That was the only way I could get it down to the bottom in that deep water. If you don’t get it down, you wind up catching sharks and ladyfish.”
Moore has been fishing mainly live shrimp on his Carolina rigs, but he’s also tried a live croaker a time or two. The croakers can entice the bigger female trout, but they also call in the sharks. And if they aren’t in the process of spawning, the female trout will mouth the croakers rather than slam them hard.
“You can also move in a little and fish the chair wells close by,” Moore added. “There are a lot of fish at Five Wells, and there are some good fish around the Dope Boat and the Compressor.”
The one caveat to the excellent fishing is that Moore is leaving the ramp at 4:30 and he’s hitting the Sound in the dark. He’s trying to either be fishing by the time the sun comes up or be close to it. A lot of the early fishing has to do with just how hot it’s been recently.
Moore has also been experimenting a little bit with some catch and release after he gets his limit, and he has found the trout willing to eat either dead bait or plastics under a popping cork the past couple of days.
