Captain Marty LaCoste with Absolute Fishing Charters (985-856-4477) expected rough weather as we headed towards Moncleuse Bay to the east of Bayou Sauveur this past Saturday. However, the sunrise hanging low on the horizon indicated otherwise, and it also lit the way to a good day on the water despite strong winds.
LaCoste and I hit a couple of pit stops on our way to Moncleuse Bay just to see if the fish were stacked on a point here or in a cut there. Without any signs that we should stay at these spots, we eventually scratched our way over shallow oyster reefs into the open water.
“The water is really low right now,” LaCoste said as he tried to keep the shells from chewing up his trolling motor propeller. “We’ve got to work our way to the deep water in the middle. With it this low, I would imagine that’s where the fish are stacked.”
LaCoste was fishing a Tsunami swim bait that he was reeling just slow enough for the bait to hit the shells every now and then. Just to show the trout something different, I fished a purple/chartreuse Saltwater Assassin Sea Shad under a popping cork.
The closer we got to the deeper water, the more bites we got. The popping cork seemed to be the deal early on, but LaCoste eventually started getting a few bumps on his swim bait. We decided to stay with the different lures until we got on a stronger bite.
My purple/chartreuse Sea Shad was attracting smaller 12-inch trout, so I tied on a glow/chartreuse to see if it would attract bigger trout. My cork went under on every cast for about 45 minutes, but many of the fish were throwbacks. For every 10 bites I got, I would say only two were keepers.
“Let’s go try over by Bayou Sauveur,” LaCoste suggested. “There’s a spot over there we call the two cuts, and there should be enough water movement through there for the fish to be there.”
LaCoste’s first cast with the swim bait was rewarded with a much larger trout than what we had been catching. As I was reaching for the net, my cork went down. After adding the fish to the ice chest, LaCoste tossed out his anchor so we could stay on the better bite.
“It’s funny how you can pull up to a spot and get two bites like that and then not catch another fish,” LaCoste said 30 minutes later. “We’re going to have to pull the anchor and run to a few other spots before the tide starts rising too much.”
The other spots produced a fish or two, but it wasn’t until we made our way back to Moncleuse Bay that we started smoking the fish again. Like before, our corks were going down just about every cast, but we still had to pick through the smaller fish. We set up drifts so that the growing wind would blow us across the hot spots, and we added a few keepers on every drift.
“I think the predicted bad weather kept most people in today,” LaCoste said as we ran back toward the ramp. “This just goes to show you that we’ve got a lot of trout here in south Terrebonne Parish. We might not have a limit, but we’ve got more than everybody that stayed home today.”