Swimbaits undulate in the water like an Olympic swimmer, making them irresistible to reluctant redfish.
We didn’t get very far after Captain CT Williams with Big Fish Charters (504-BIGFISH) turned his boat to the southeast as he entered the MRGO from Bayou La Loutre. The big pile of rocks stretching from one side of the canal to the other blocked our way, as it has everybody else that has fished the MRGO since April 22.
“The dam hasn’t really changed a lot of the fishing along the MRGO,” said Williams as he tossed me a live shrimp. “But it has changed where people fish, and there’s a long stretch from below this dam down to Alabama that is hardly getting fished at all right now because few want to make that double run up and back.”
Williams noticed a lot of bait stacked up against the bottom of the dam, and he instructed Chef Tenney Flynn, executive chef and co-owner of GW Fins on Bienville in the French Quarter, and me to toss our popping corks toward any nervous bait we saw. We immediately began reeling in speckled trout, sheepshead and white trout.
After about an hour of fishing, Williams decided to run back Breton Sound Marina to get some more bait and put some more gas in his boat, as he wanted to show me a way to get around the dam without running all the way down the back levee canal to the cut at Alabama.
“It’s a little intimidating going around this way if you haven’t run it before,” Williams said as he turned out of Bayou La Loutre into Engineers Canal then down through Bakers and Half Moon. “All these areas we’re riding through right now are going to open up a lot, I think, because of the increased tidal flow through them. All that water that used to go down the MRGO has to go somewhere, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this entire area eventually opens up and becomes part of Bay Eloi.”
We turned back to the NW as we entered the MRGO within site of the dam and ran up to its base. Williams rigged up a drop-shot rig with a shrimp and handed it to me while he started free floating a croaker.
“Everybody’s still learning how to fish this dam,” he explained, “and these are the two techniques that seem to be rising to the top. With the drop shot, you can bounce your weight off the rocks without getting your hooks hung, and the lack of tidal flow right here means you can freeline a shrimp or croaker all you want.”
We gave the dam only a little bit of our time because Williams wanted to run the rest of the MRGO to see what we could find. He had some fish stacked up in Lake Athanasio and around Gardner Island, and he wanted to try the Alabama cut and the new cut created from the Corps of Engineers moving rocks from the long rocks to construct the dam.
School trout were seemingly everywhere we went, and if they were there they almost immediately began pulling down our pearl white 3-inch Berkley Gulp! Alive! Swimming Mullets. We got in them pretty thick in Athanasio and found trout scattered along the long rocks and in the new cut.
“The bottom line is this dam closed off a major highway for trout to move in and out of Lake Pontchartrain,” Williams concluded as we wrapped up our day. “Trout are going to have to find different ways around, and they’ll probably go back to using places they did before like Lake Borgne, Proctors, Unknown Pass, Thomas Bayou and Bayou Bienvenue.
“That means we’re all still in the learning stages as to has this dam is going to affect the fishing. Don’t give up on your old spots if they aren’t producing right now, but at the same time, start looking around at some new stuff. Some of the spots closer to the dam have cooled off because of the lack of tide, but others are opening up. Just keep poking around until you find some fish because they haven’t left the building just yet.”
