Rigs, wellheads, shell pads hold specks that move in to spend the summer
It’s no secret where you can find Chas Champagne when June arrives. He will be running from rig to rig on Lake Borgne, looking for a mother lode of speckled trout – because the timing is right.
Champagne, who runs Dockside Bait & Tackle in Slidell and manufactures the popular Matrix Shad soft-plastic lures, said it’s just a matter of salt; fish are moving from areas with lower salinity to Lake Borgne, and the rigs, well heads and shell pads attract them like magnets.
“The specks move into (Lake) Pontchartrain in the fall and stay there through the winter and early spring,” he said. “Specks don’t need a lot of salinity those times of the year. But they know they need ‘X’ level to float their eggs, so when spawning season approaches, they go looking for saltier water.”
And that means Lake Borgne, which covers almost 180,000 surface acres between Pontchartrain and the Gulf, bordered to the west by the MRGO and wetlands in St. Bernard Parish and to the east by the Biloxi Marsh. The huge lagoon is dotted with hundreds of wellheads and rigs, past and present, and those structures hold thousands and thousands of specks, most of them in the 14- to 18-inch range.
Where to go
With all that water, most of it around 10 feet deep, how do you pick and choose spots? There are dozens of rigs and reefs marked on most maps. Champagne said he’ll fish the east end if we’ve had a particularly wet spring and the water is stained to dingy.
“The water at the east end will be a lot cleaner and saltier,” he said. “Let the land help you; fish the eastern end on an east wind and the western end on a west wind.”
And when you’re ready to fish, just pick a wellhead or rig – size doesn’t necessarily matter – and start fishing.
“I like to go when it’s calm enough to use a trolling motor, and I’ll drop it and make a lap around a rig,” Champagne said. “You’ll notice a sweet spot on every rig; you’ve just got to find it. Maybe the shells are thicker on that side.
“They are always putting in new wellheads and pulling out old ones, all the time, but the shell beds on the bottom will always be there.”
A puzzle to solve
Champagne said specks may be using the rig’s pilings as ambush points on one rig; he may have to turn his back to the rig and cast away from it, to the edge of the shell bed, on another. It’s a matter of solving each rig’s particular puzzle, but once solved, there are usually enough specks around for some fast action.
“Pay close attention to any slicks that might pop up, because that’s the fish,” said Champagne, who will use a Matrix Shad on a ⅜-ounce jig head most of the time – maybe a 5/16-ounce head on a calm day.
“You don’t need a half-ounce; it’s not that deep,” he said. “And I never see anybody fishing a cork; the bite is going to be on the bottom. If the water is real clear, use clear or opaque colors. If it’s dirty, use more vibrant colors.
“Live shrimp will always be good in the summer, but if you pull up to a rig and there’s nobody else on it, live shrimp will not be that important. But if the guides have found that rig and a lot of live shrimp are being used, it can make it difficult to get a bite on plastics.”
