More cool weather and a couple of weeks should make the difference, fishing guide says
It may be officially fall on the calendar now, but speckled trout haven’t quite gotten the message to head back into interior marshes near Cocodrie and Dularge, according to a fishing guide.
“I’ve been talking around, and they haven’t really kicked up yet,” said Capt. Tommy Pellegrin, with Custom Charters in Houma. “They have some inside, but you have to catch them on the slack tide. The tide range has been pretty hard, and the little bit they’ve been biting has been in between tides.
“Right now ladyfish are still mixed in. That tells me if ladyfish are still in the marsh, the trout aren’t in the marsh yet. They’ll swap spots.”
The good news, though, is that it shouldn’t be long before the trout transition begins in earnest.
“We haven’t had enough cold weather yet to push them,” he said. “But they have a ton of shrimp, so they’ll be there, no doubt. We’re just on the borderline.
“I’d say in two weeks it will be a world of difference. All of a sudden, it’s going to change.”
But if you’re dead set on making a trout trip now out of Dularge or Cocodrie, Pellegrin said you’d need two lures to try to locate them on shell reefs along the coast — in spots like the north bank of Lake Pelto or the north side of Lake Barre.
“If I would go specifically to find trout, I would have two baits rigged up — and only two. One would be a Berkley Rattle Shrimp in coastal candy color, and the other would be a High Life Tackle Big Eye in purple haze on a ¼- or ⅛-ounce jighead,” he said. “Both of them under a cork. If you’re going to search, you need to fish with a cork.
“With those two baits, if there are trout around, you will catch them — no ifs, ands or buts about it.”
Redfish-wise, Pellegrin said the bite has been consistently good. He fished alone on Wednesday, and caught a limit with High Life’s Conehead lure in avocado flake on a ¼-ounce jighead.
“I beat the bank and caught all mine on plastic. All the ones I saw, I did not catch,” he said. “The ones I caught were blind casts at a point or a cut where it looked like a redfish should be.
“I’d cast and catch one, but if I saw one and pitched to it, it would just swim right over it.”
Most redfish are being caught now with cracked crab Carolina-rigged in deep holes near Grand Pass, Big Bayou Dularge and Grand Caillou Bayou, he said.
“Pretty much everybody is fishing redfish and drum,” he said. “They’re just tearing it up — that’s just what we do this time of year.”
