Trout anglers have had ideal conditions the past couple of days, and the reports coming from the mouth of the Mississippi River encouraged Capt. Lloyd Landry (504-912-8291), Tony Taylor and me as we headed motored down Buras Canal in search of a mule. This was going to be our day.
“This is my favorite place to fish in all the world,” said Landry as he let his bay boat fall off plane. “Scofield, don’t let me down. I know there are some Kamala trout here somewhere. We’ve just got to find them.”
Since we were on the hunt four trout as big as our legs, we began throwing Zara Spooks, She Dogs and Skitter Walks near the beaches where the waves from the Gulf were crashing against shallow ridges and humps. The tide was rising, and we had a light chop. Things were looking great.
It was apparent at our first stop that we probably wouldn’t find our trout there. There weren’t any baitfish or mullet flicking around, and the beach looked deserted. A couple half-hearted swipes from some trout with eyes bigger than their bellies made Landry decide to speed up our search until he saw the signs of big-trout water.
“This spot was loaded with bait a couple days ago,” he said. “That bait didn’t go far, though. We’re just going to speed up and even idle around if we have to find them again. If we can find that bait, we’ll find a big trout.”
Our next stop looked more promising as Taylor pointed out some bait jumping around in a trough behind a breaker. The trout there were a little more excited to see us, and they eagerly began slashing into our topwater walkers. While these were good trout up to 4 pounds, we wanted bigger.
“Check out all that bait behind that cut over there,” Taylor announced. “We need to get over there because that’s where our big one is sitting. Let’s work our way over, though, because there might be one out here in the trough.”
There were several trout in the trough willing to smash into our topwaters. We finally made our way through the cut and started tossing our lures into the frantic bait that was skipping across the surface.
I made a long cast and let my She Dog sit a second. Almost as soon as I began to walk it back, a trout came up from behind it and took a swipe, then another, and another. That trout slashed at my bait four times before she finally got hooked up. Unfortunately, she didn’t stay hooked up for long.
“Got too much bass fisherman in you,” Landry scolded. “You leaned a little too hard on her when you pulled back. Oh man, my knees are weak. That was a hog. Did you see how long she was — at least 7 pounds.”
We didn’t feel so bad that the trophy trout neophyte had lost a good one. Surely there were some more around, and there were, but none came anywhere close to the size of the one that got away.
We beat the surface until the tide stopped pushing in, but the topwater bite quickly faded to a memory. Landry decided that it was time to make a meat haul, so we tied on Norton Sand Eels and ReAction Bayou Chubs, and began casting them to the backside of the breaker and pulling them down into the trough.
Several trout later, I asked Landry what he would do if he had to catch a trophy trout. We went off in search of the trophy that wound up eluding us by the end of the day. I had to deflect the pointed jabs and sharply aimed insults, but that was OK. Somebody may have even made mention of the fact that I live above I-10.
Oh well, we had a box full of big trout, so we wouldn’t have had room to put a trophy anyway. There’s always tomorrow.
