When Lake Pontchartrain regular Chas Champagne told me to meet him at the Rigolets Marina at 4:15 in the morning, I wondered if he had lost his mind. It wouldn’t get light enough to see until at least 5:30 or so, and we were only headed to the L&N train bride.
“We left around 5 in the morning the other day, and it was like the NASCAR races with everything racing to get over here,” Champagne said as we idled away from the marina. “As you can see, we’re not the only ones leaving this early, and I imagine there will be a boat or two already tied up when we get there.”
It didn’t take long for me to understand just how crowded of a situation we would be fishing as boats began to gain on us from behind. And by the time the sun began to shine on the metal structure, there were at least 25 boats all trying to catch the same trout.
“Let’s get out of here,” Champagne said as our croaker hole started heating up. “We don’t have the right tide, and we’re going to waste a lot of shrimp sitting here. You every fished the reds in the mouth of the Pearl?”
I had fished the Pearl many times, but couldn’t recall a time when I fished its mouth where it dumps into the Rigolets. Champagne had told me numerous times that the lower Pearl heats up for redfish and speckled trout as the weather starts to cool down, but we were still a couple months away from consistently cool weather.
As Champagne pushed his Tidewater bay boat toward the bayou that dumps into East Pearl just south of the train bridge, I wondered if we were getting a little too close to a boat already fishing the point. Their anchor rope was the only sign we needed that they were staying put.
“I found these fish yesterday by fishing all this area,” said Champagne as he started throwing a Lemon Drop Hybrid soft plastic toward some wood cover right at the edge of the water. “That’s the way it is right now. You can fish for a while before you find them, but once you get a bite you’ll find the reds stacked up. If that other boat is only fishing the point, they would never find these fish.”
We had 15 reds in the boat about 30 minutes later, so Champagne waved the other boat on over. All of our reds came from a spot about 50 yards wide and 20 yards off the bank. Champagne explained that it was a sloping bank and that the reds would bite just about anywhere along that gradual drop.
All of our redfish on this trip came on the Lemon Drop Hybrid bumped off the bottom, a BOOYAH Samurai Blade spinnerbaits crawled over the bottom and live shrimp fished on bottom with a Carolina rig.
