Speckled trout thick in Delacroix hotspot.
For the male of our species, few days on the calendar are more cherished than Thanksgiving with all the food, football and, yes, even the family. But once the foil-wrapped leftovers are tucked away in the fridge and our wives are scanning the sale papers for insane Black Friday deals, we all feel that call to get in the woods or on the water.
If you’re more inclined to the latter than the former, it would be hard to beat the action in Delacroix’s Skippy Lake right now.
The speckled trout have moved into the annual hotspot, and the recent mild conditions have them attacking shrimp with reckless abandon.
I took my buddy Mike Pelle, his son Jacob and my son Joel Monday (Nov. 21) on a Delacroix excursion, and the action in Skippy was non-stop.
We bought 125 live shrimp at Sweetwater Marina, and started the day in a pond near Lake Batola, fishing in a thick fog bank. Jacob is a beginner angler, so I wanted to put him on some line-stripping reds, but 30 minutes later, we were leaving the pond, having boated only one trout, two bass, a freshwater catfish, two undersized black drum and two undersized redfish.
We made a drift in Lake Batola, where the water was beautiful, aided by the falling tide pulling clean water out of the grass-filled ponds as well as the east wind pushing in pretty water from outside. The action in Batola was sluggish, however. With only another two or three trout in the cooler and more places to fish than time, we ran down the Pencil Canal to Skippy.
We made a short drift, and before long we were anchored up catching trout on every cast. The boys had a blast, while I spent far more time baiting hooks, removing fish and taking pictures than I did actually fishing. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
The action only slowed when we ran out of live bait and began to throw DOAs. Bigger fish hit the DOAs, but not at the same rate. Our ice chest was bulging with more speckled trout than we wanted to clean, so it didn’t really matter. We left Skippy at 10:30.
I got back to the dock and talked to Tommy Banta, who works with Capt. Jack Payne at Sweetwater. He said the trout action is simply on fire, and there are lots of options for anglers, including Little Lake and Four Horse Lake.
In fact, Banta had limited that morning in Little Lake, less than a 10-minute run from the marina.
To read a feature story on the most effective autumn technique in the Delacroix area, be sure to pick up a copy of the December issue of Louisiana Sportsman, which is hitting newsstands now. Or you can download the digital edition right to your computer or mobile device!
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