If you've made cut-in-stone fishin' plans for this Saturday and Sunday,
there's no need to even anticipate changing a thing. I'm here to tell you that
there are plenty of redfish in the canals and trout in the ponds at Port Sulphur,
and I'd wager good money that they're gonna be hungry and feeding all weekend.
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Kevin Breen / WWL-TV
Frank shows one of many fish reeled in by
he and his crew Thursday and he says there's many more where that came
from. |
"I mean, look what's in the prediction," Capt. Eric Muhoberac of
Louisiana Paradise Fishing Charters forecasted. "Aside from it being a tad
windy--which is insignificant because weekenders ought to stay inside the
protected marshes to chase down both their trout and redfish--the day is
supposed to be bright and sunny, the tide is supposed to be almost textbook
perfect, and the temperatures are supposed to be ideally spring-like. You just
can't get any better fishing conditions than those."
Muhoberac and his sidekick, Capt. Rob "Redbone" Martin, guided me
and my camera crew for this week's "Fishin' Game Report" TV production
Thursday morning. We got on the water just after sunrise and the videotaping and
fish-catching situation remained at nothing but perfect all morning long.
"I truly believe the weekend guys are gonna kill 'em Saturday and
Sunday," Martin interjected. "And the overall approach to insuring a
good catch is gonna be simple--launch at Hi-Ridge Marina, head over to the
pipeline canals and the landlocked marsh ponds that lie between Grande Ecaille
and Dulac, and start off fishing with both plastic baits and live Cocahoe
minnows, depending upon what they want at the time. I'd have a rod and reel
rigged for tightlining and another one rigged with a Speculizer. Simply
alternate them throughout the day to determine the species preference from spot
to spot and hour to hour."
Here's how our chronolog went:
>Thursday morning before 8 o'clock, we were taking decent sized redfish on
the glow-in-the-dark DOA shrimp under a Speculizer.
>After 9 o'clock or so, we begin to catch just as many fish tightline,
using various colors of Old BaySide plastics rigged on a quarter ounce jighead
fished dead slow on the bottom.
>By 10 am., the catch "mix" had changed. Speculizers on the
surface were murder on the trout; plastics on the bottom on a jighead were
beginning to pick up various size trout.
>On or about 10:30 or so, we discovered that some of the spots that looked
to be non-productive at the outset suddenly switched on for both trout and
redfish when we switched over to live Cocahoe minnows on a Carolina rig. So was
there a predictable "pattern" emerging? Not hardly.
>The remainder of the morning, until quitting time at noon, we threw every
concievable combination of terminal tackle--instinctively! And not even the most
liberal bookie in Vegas would give you odds at successfully using one bait/one
rig over the other. Are you getting the drift of my implication here? To put it
another way, I'm betting this is exactly how you'll have to fish Port Sulphur
this coming weekend! Can I haven an amen!
There is one other point to make, though. And it's probably the most critical
point. Or should I say "points?" One, find clean, clean, clean water.
That's where the fish will be. Two, fish only during an actively moving tide
(incoming or outgoing). That's when the fish will bite. And here's a little
lagniappe you need to keep in mind. Do you need to roll out of bed long before
the pre-dawn hours to get a jump on the fishing? Not during Daylight Saving Time
you don't! A number of the old-timers and old-pros swear that you can head out
around 5 pm and still come up with a great "day" of fishing.
Now. . .so much for Port Sulphur. I'm getting phone calls and e-mails and
scribbled notes on brown paper bags telling me that Lake Pontchartrain has
turned on! Bigtime! For big trout! But as a professional angler, I'm not going
to over-react and I'm not going to react prematurely. Next Thursday I'm
scheduled to fish the lake again with Capt. Kenny Kreeger. You have my word that
the exact minute we set foot back on Tite's wharf at North Shore I'll post a
report--blow-by-blow--that will either confirm or deny the insinuations. Talk
with you again next Thursday afternoon!
In the meantime, if you want to fish Port Sulphur, don't have your own boat
and motor, and want to book either Capt. Eric or Capt. Redbone for a charter,
you can call them at 985-564-03474 or 504-319-4446. But until next week, be
careful and be courteous out there. . .
Frank Davis
