Corps to continue monitoring environmental effects
The gates are closed and the Mississippi River is falling. The question remains, though, of what effect the opening of the Bonnet Carré Spillway had on the normally spectacular speckled trout fishing at Lake Pontchartrain during the spring. If my recent trip with Captain Greg Schlumbrecht with To Fish Charters (985-960-1709) is an indicator, the answer is “not much.”
“You can’t miss the fact that the top of the lake is freshwater from the Mississippi right now,” Schlumbrecht said as we made our way to the southern end of the Trestle. “There is still plenty of saltwater underneath it, though, and the trout are still here. We had a couple slow days since they opened the spillway, but for the most part the fish never stopped biting.”
Schlumbrecht, who had just wrapped up a charter trip that produced a near limit of fish, wanted to go to the south side to get away from some of the crowds that he had found on other sections of the Trestle. However, when we arrived, we found no fewer than 10 boats all crowded on the last few pilings.
“Not even going to get mixed up in that crowd,” he said as he dropped his trolling motor approximately 60 pilings away from them. “We’ll just have to catch them out here where I guess nobody thinks there are any fish.”
And catch them we did. Schlumbrecht had rigged our rods with a couple of the Midnight Blue Moon Deadly Dudley Terror Tails that he threaded onto 3/8-ounce jigheads. Much like bass fishing, we pitched our plastics to the pilings and let them sink all the way to the bottom.
“The number of throwbacks we caught today was unreal,” Schlumbrecht said as we began fishing. “We couldn’t get out on the bridge, though, because the wind was too bad. There are some good fish here, and we should be able to catch a few up to 3 pounds.”
We landed about 15 fish on our first pass toward the crowd at the end of the bridge, and probably missed just as many. The fish were biting as the plastics fell back to the bottom, which made setting the hook with so much slack line a challenge.
As we move on into late May and June, Schlumbrecht said he expects the bite to shift from plastics to live bait fished either under a sliding cork or on a Carolina rig. This means the Bayou Lacombe and Lake Borgne rigs will come more into play, too.
“The spillway didn’t kill us like some expected,” Schlumbrecht said as we made our way back to the dock. “I think we lost a few trips because people thought the worst, but it never shut down completely. Most of the trouble we had was with the wind rather than the muddy water.”
