fishing in the dark

When a good friend says "You want to come down to New Orleans play some shows and fish for a few weeks and have a free place to stay with a pool?" Your response should be "Yes".

I drove down to New Orleans with my Hobie on my truck. I don't have A/C in my 91 Toyota Pickup truck. There were storms and it was hot the whole way down. Not a good combo. I stopped in Knoxville on the way down and on the way back up. Eight-hour drives on google maps easily turn into 11- to 13- hour drives in my reality.

My first trip was to Lacombe Bayou on the North Shore of Lake Ponchartrain. It was evening. I was skunked.

Bayou Lacombe

While there, I ran into two kayakers, David and his friend, who were kind enough to point me in the direction of Delacroix.

Delacroix

I did a solo trip there the next day. I did pretty well.

Large Mouth Bass - brackish

decent red

personal record smallest red

another decent red

It was tough getting used to the small size limits. Most of the Reds ranged between 16" and 26". The salt water large mouth bass were a surprise to me. They were all fairly small. Most of the Specs were small, and there weren't too many.

I believe all of these fish were caught on my faithful Zara Spook Jr with upgraded hooks for Stripers.

The rumors were that the water was generally low, and it was really weedy, so whenever I got a good cast in I had confidence that there would be a fish.

I didn't know exactly how scared to be of the alligators. And the Nutria were everywhere.

From nose to eyes in inches = feet in alligator length

The next day I met Dave and his friend Sonny down at Delacroix at 6 AM. It's about a 45 minute from mid-town, where I was staying.

redfish

Sonny and Dave

Sonny is losing a big red

topwater red

Redfish go for $15 a pound at the market down there. At one point I definitely had ten pounds of redfish in the fridge....

Dave's 27" red

Sonny - alligator alley

I fished Delacroix a few more times, and also started launching at Shell beach, which was a slightly different body of water. It was less flat and more dynamic in types of structure. In other words, I could get more casts in without weeds. Also there was a castle there called Fort Proctor.

Gar were everywhere, and while I thought after the first day that an alligator had attacked my kayak, in all likelihood it was just a large Gar giving my Kayak a tail swipe.

The lure of choice for dave and Sonny was a weedless gold spoon. While I tried this, and it worked as half of these fish were caught on it or a gold spinner bait, I still went back to throwing my Spook Jr. whenever things slowed down. I am always more confident in at least getting strikes on that lure than anything else.