Cooler temperatures inspire Ouachita River bass to attack just about anything anglers throw.
Exasperation hung heavily over the heads of the North Louisiana Media Bass team members as they wrapped up the weigh-in at their final tournament at the Ouachita River this past summer.
All but six of the teams were saddled with sacks of bass weighing 9 pounds or less. And the six teams that did manage to break the double-digit mark barely got the scale to push past 10 pounds.
The elephant in the room was that, unlike six or seven years ago, just about every one of the anglers ambling back to their bass boats beached along the sand bar below Lazarre Point in West Monroe wished they could have been anywhere but there.
One team in particular was especially irritated. They had been on a fairly strong bite just days before the tournament, but their hotspot turned into a gar hole, and they had to pull out all the stops just to catch an 8.31-pound five-fish limit of bass.
“I’m not coming back here until the fall,” bemoaned West Monroe angler Mark Smith who lives just minutes from the landing. “A few years ago, you could have been sitting on this spot with five or six other boats, and every one of you would be chunking and winding and catching fish — even in the miserable, hot summer.”
Smith, best known for leading the 2009 Bassmaster Atchafalaya Basin Central Open for the first two days only to tie Edwin Evers on the final day and eventually fall 4 pounds short at the end of an extra tie-breaker day, turned to his tournament partner E.K. Koserog and started talking about the good old days.
Koserog, owner of EK’s Marine in West Monroe, put in that he thought bass fishing on the Ouachita River had been dropping off for the last seven or eight years.
“The best record kept is the chamber tournament they have in Arkansas,” he said. “Not too long ago, it took 27, 28 and then 24 pounds to win, and then BAM — 20 and 18. It took 14 or 15 to win it one year, and they ran all the way down here to Monroe to catch their fish.”
The winning weight jumped back up to 18 pounds this past summer, but that was no comfort for two anglers standing around soaking in sweat with visions of an early fall flashing in their minds.
“Fall is the best time to catch fish at the Ouachita River, period,” Koserog insisted. “They’ll be feeding up getting ready for winter, and you’ll see them schooling around the shad activity and following the shad to the backs of the sloughs as the water cools off.
“They start congregating, and you catch more than one fish in most spots because they’re grouped up herding those shad.”
Smith and Koserog pointed to last fall as to what can happen on the Ouachita River when conditions get right. The water level was unusually high this time last year, and it was great for the fishing. Both anglers found the numbers and sizes of the fish to be a unbelievable.
The water was high enough to get back in the fields and sloughs, and the additional current that the high water generated lasted for four months. And as any bass anglers worth his salt knows, current fish are feeding fish.
“If I could hand pick my conditions for fall fishing,” Smith said, “I would want the water at 23 feet and 65 degrees. That will put bass in very predictable places back in the sloughs, and you can catch them on just about anything you want to throw. And it wouldn’t be nearly as tough to get to them with the higher water because you could get over the stumps that guard these kinds of places.”
The predictable places of which Smith spoke are beaver huts, live cypress trees, stumps, flooded buck brush on top of ridges and flooded roadbeds and pipelines. Put a little moving water on these kinds of places, and catching an 18-pound tournament limit becomes a very reasonable goal.
Which of these places is the best is dependent upon the presence of shad. Take an old roadbed for instance. Shad congregate on the tops of these high spots, and the bass literally just corral them and hold them there and feed on them. That’s what happened last year that made the fishing so good.
If the shad move, the fish move.
“The women’s bass tour fished here early last year, and they weren’t really catching any big fish,” Koserog recalled. “They were catching a lot of fish, but nothing to speak of. Turns out, it was a matter of 40 yards that would have turned their 11-pound sacks into the upper teens.”
Koserog and a friend went to each of the spots the ladies fished after the tournament was over. They had showed a few of the competitors around before the tournament, and the spots that they knew the women were fishing weren’t holding the same kind of fish they were before.
“We went in the Sunday after they left and checked the fish,” he said. “The bass had moved approximately 20 to 40 yards off the spots because the shad had moved. We found one of the spots in the back of Boggy Bayou and quit fishing at 35 with plenty of 3- and 4-pound fish.”
If the water is right this year like it was last fall, Smith says finding the proverbial needle in a haystack is a little easier if you pay attention to what’s going on around you, especially the tree line on the bank.
Whether you’re fishing a lake off the Ouachita River or a slough off of D’Arbonne Bayou, the river’s major tributary just north of Monroe and West Monroe, you’ll eventually notice that there are gaps in the timber where it meets the water’s edge.
“It’s pretty obvious if you know what you’re looking for,” Koserog said. “Tree, tree, tree, gap, tree — you get the picture. Then you notice that the gap is just about the same width as what a road would be. Some of those gaps are old roads and some are pipelines. The pipelines are especially easy to pick out.”
Moving out into the lake or slough from the cleared out spot on the bank, check your depth finder as you idle around. You’ll spot the roadbed or pipeline because it will be either a hard bottom, totally clean or clean with just a few sprigs of grass jutting up off the bottom.
“If we’ve got water this fall, hunt for the road beds,” Koserog advised. “If we don’t have the water, either fish out of a small boat to get to the backs of the sloughs or head out to the main river and fish the two drops that parallel the entire length of the river.”
The Ouachita River channel used to be 7 feet back in the 60s and 70s. Now it’s maintained at 9 feet, which keeps 21 feet of water in the river as its normal level. Many of the sloughs and river lakes where people fish today used to be used as dirt-bike trails, but it is the double drop along the main river that gets a lot of attention.
Picture this in your mind. When the river channel was maintained at 7 feet, there was a riverbank scoured at that level. When the water rose, that old riverbank was inundated, and a new bank was scoured higher and farther out away from the main channel as the water spread out.
“That means there are two drop-offs up and down this river,” Koserog added. “It created a stair-step set of ledges that congregate bass where brush and timber jams against these old banks.
“To find these drops, put your boat on the bank and slowly start idling toward the middle of the river. You’ll see them drop sharply on your depth finder as you move.”
Whether you choose to fish up D’Arbonne Bayou, the main river or the river lakes, Smith and Koserog recommended carrying an assortment of lures that would allow you to work everything from the top to the bottom. If that sounds like too much of a catch-all recommendation, that’s because it is.
“But you’re going to need them,” Smith said. “These bass are actively feeding during the fall, so you can do well on the different baits that you can work fast. But you never know if they’re going to be on the spinnerbait, buzz bait or the crankbait, and it can change from day to day.”
Smith, who is admittedly more of a pitcher and flipper, never leaves home without an assortment of soft plastics like tubes and creature baits. And he favors a jig and plastic trailer for just about everywhere he fishes regardless of the cover or conditions.
The good thing about Louisiana’s sizzling summers is that they eventually come to an end. And that end usually happens some time during October. Cooler nights will start pushing the water temperature down. And if that coincides with the water level going up, the only thing you’re going to be exasperated about at the Ouachita River is figuring out how to get off work so you can go fishing.