South Central LA

Bass Fishing

Rockets to Ribbits

April 24, 2005 Marty Cannon

It was a steamy summer afternoon, and we were fishing in Mama’s Pond in the western Atchafalaya Basin. The water was just high enough to back into the trees and bushes along the shoreline.

My partners and I were throwing chartreuse buzz baits into the cover as far as we could, and we got a few good strikes on top. Still, in some spots, we could see about 8 more feet of good-looking water that we couldn’t touch with those buzz baits. That was 8 feet of fish-holding water that we couldn’t access, and it deeply annoyed us.

We all fiddled with some of the lures in our tackle boxes, and the three of us probably all gave a frog or a rat bait a brief look. It was weedless and maybe suitable for the situation, but that kind of lure is more of a novelty isn’t it? It catches fishermen, right, not bass?

That was our thinking, and it probably cost us dearly.
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Basin Bream Bash

April 24, 2005 Andy Crawford

Gabby was never much of a fisherman. Oh, sure, she’d go out with the family when we would fish, but just so she could feel the wind in her hair as we ran the boat from one spot to another.[…]

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Nighttime Raids

March 24, 2005 John K. Flores

Trivia has it that Georges Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935), the father of French cuisine, listed frog legs on the menu of the famous Hotel Carlton in London as, “Cuisses de Nymphe Aurore.”

Considered a disgusting food by the British, who could resist an item on the menu with a name such as “Legs of the Dawn Nymphs?”[…]

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Monsters of the Midway

March 31, 2004 Todd Masson

Capt. Bill Lake meant no disrespect toward his sparring partner. “That’s not the size we wanted,” he muttered after gaining a glimpse of a 2 1/2-pound trout that was darting around haphazardly in a desperate and futile attempt to regain its freedom.[…]

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Fly Delta

January 24, 2004 Todd Masson

Hunt a place for a decade, and you’ll see sights known to no other man. Hunt a place as productive as the Atchafalaya Delta for a decade, and you’ll have a front-row seat to manifestations of nature too glorious to be fully appreciated by just one man.[…]