When the sun’s shining this month, drop everything you’re doing, grab some Rat-L-Traps, and head to the Causeway.
I’m not sure where the black cloud that perennially floats over my head came from, but it has figured out how to stick tight despite my best attempts to try to outrun it in a boat.
Needless to say, the morning I met Capt. Eric Dumas (985.705.1244) at the Mandeville Harbor on the Northshore was a far cry from what we expected. Too bad the Weather Channel didn’t get the memo that I would be going fishing the next day.
Dumas had been texting me some images of 3- and 4-pound trout he was catching on the Causeway spanning the middle of Lake Pontchartrain.
His best bite had been when the sun was out and shining strongly, and wouldn’t you know the clouds were thick and heavy as we made the short run from the harbor to the bridge despite all the forecasts to the contrary.
Riding along with us was Julian Lee along with his two sons Adam and Brandon. Julian Lee is from Brookhaven, Miss., and his son Adam drove down from Jackson. Brandon Lee lives in North Carolina, and he was just happy to have a little time off of his busy work schedule.
Julian and Adam Lee drive down twice a week to fish the inshore waters of Southeast Louisiana, but this was the first either of them would be trolling the Causeway. If they had any inclination of the luck I would be bringing them, I’m sure they would have desperately tried to reschedule.
The clouds made the late February morning a little nippy, and we all wondered what was in store by the time we arrived at the spot about two miles south of the north shore where Dumas was going to begin our first trolling pass toward the south.
As we bounced on rolling waves between the spans, Dumas began tying on the lures that had been most productive for him his four or five prior trips to this one. Some lines got a 3/4-ounce gold/black Rat-L-Trap, and the others got a 3/4-ounce chrome/blue Trap.
“I keep both out when I make a pass,” Dumas said. “The chrome/blue used to be my favorite, but I figured these fish were Saints fans, so I started fishing the black/gold Trap, and that’s been the best the last few trips.”
The Trap Dumas was tying on to the clear-blue 17-pound-test Stren line bore the scars of proof. It looked like it had been in a fight with a wild cat, and the paint was becoming but a distant memory.
One of the other two rods was spooled with 30-pound Power Pro braided line. Dumas mixes it up between the mono and braid to see if the fish prefer one over the other. And if you don’t think your line would make that much of a difference, think again. Every trout we caught this trip came on Traps tied to braided line.
As Dumas and Adam Lee began tossing the Traps out the back of the boat, each angler allowed their reels to remain in free spool as the boat moved forward. Dumas fed approximately 40 yards of line to each bait, and then they engaged the reels and stuck one on each side of the boat and one in the middle of the rod rack behind the console seat.
Our first 2-mile pass produced exactly one trout. With an eye to the sky, Dumas explained what we would need for the bite to really turn on.
“We’ve had a couple good days with the cloud cover,” he began, “but everybody knows the trout bite best on the Causeway when the sun is out. Not too sure why that is. Could be the shade line of the bridge. Could be the Traps flash better. Could be the bait congregates more. Whatever it is, I want those clouds to break so we can turn these fish on.”
Rather than turn around and troll back the direction from which we just came, Dumas cranked his big Yamaha and ran back to where we had begun our first pass. He planned on trolling between the two spans again to see if anything had changed since our first pass.
By the time we got to the end of this run, the sunlight was just starting to make its break from behind the clouds. And just about the time the first beam hit Lake Pontchartrain, one of the rod tips started bouncing. After another two-mile run, we had one medium-sized trout and one that aspired to be a medium-sized trout.
“You notice that fish hit right when the sun came out?” Dumas quizzed everybody on board his Ranger bay boat. “Looks like it’s out for good now, so we’re just going to keep making pass after pass. Pull in all the lines because we’re running back to do it again. If we can keep the sun out and get the water to warm up a little bit, we should be alright.”
We were about to find out.
By the time we started our third pass, we were definitely not the only trollers on the Causeway. And just about every one that we passed interrogated Dumas as to why the fish weren’t biting.
They had seen all his reports at LouisianaSportsman.com, and were trying to rub it in a little that even he was having trouble on this particular day. But Dumas kept insisting that things would soon turn around as the sun continued to warm up the water and that he expected the trout bite to turn on any minute.
I’ve got to admit my expectations weren’t as high as Dumas’, but I’ve fished with him enough times to know he had a rabbit hidden somewhere in his boat and that he was getting ready to pull it out.
I’m not sure if Adam Lee felt the same way. He had fished with Dumas before but had never trolled the Causeway, so this was a learning experience for him, too. Being a quick study, Lee figured out that our lack of action probably had something to do with the cameraman being in the boat.
“You’re not staying all day, are you?” he jabbed as we began our third pass. “I think these trout know we’ve got a camera in the boat. Maybe after you leave we’ll have a blast.”
The sun began to shine even stronger just a couple hundred yards into our third run, and the shade line from the southbound span was starting to creep farther and farther to the east.
Dumas thought this was a good thing, as was the added bonus of the east wind pushing our Traps up against the southbound span right into the bright water as we trolled toward the south.
“Looks like things are about to pick up,” Dumas said as he closely monitored his depth finder. “There’s a lot of bait balls starting to show up on the depth finder, and that’s usually a good sign that the trout are going to bite.”
Dumas turned on the charm on his third pass, and we started slinging some quality trout into the boat. Granted, they weren’t the studs that he had been texting me pictures of, but they were definitely headed in that direction.
Adam Lee was happy to see the box starting to fill up with fish because he admittedly has had trouble locating trout early in the year during his twice-a-week trips to Southeast Louisiana.
“I’m definitely learning something today,” Lee announced as he watched his dad put another fish in the boat. “We like to come down and fish around on our own, but going with a guide like Capt. Eric every now and then shows us some things we can try when we’re on our own that we might not have ever learned otherwise.”
By the time Dumas pulled off the Causeway to run me back to my truck, the trip had done a complete 180-degree turnaround. Dumas admitted that it wasn’t nearly as fast as it had been for him during the middle of that same week, but it was enough to keep Adam Lee, his dad and brother interested and wanting some more.
My black cloud must have followed me home as the anglers remaining on the lake began to experience an uptick in their luck as evidenced by the text messages I started getting by the time I reached the Bogue Chitto River on my way back home.
One in particular showed Adam Lee holding up a troll of a trout that he landed about 30 minutes after they returned back to the Causeway.
The final box count wasn’t all that impressive at 20 something fish, but on a Saturday morning when everybody was trying to figure out what went wrong, Dumas was able to spring the trap on enough troll trout to make everything right.
