Devin
Forum Replies Created
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Some more info:
Bass are in the Biloxi Marsh are gone. Kiss them goodbye, they weren’t there before the Freshening, they won’t be coming back unless there’s another one (hopefully not).
If you’re looking for them in Lafitte, go back to Blue Canal if it’s not posted, or even the north end of the Pen. I’d also look hard at Salvador and Cataouatche.
As for Venice, find canals with a steep shoreline, especially any that have trees growing on them with their roots going into the water. Undercut banks are great. Long, shallow, sloping shorelines are not worth your time. You want to flip on something that has a little depth that bass can get in but still have something to relate to.
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Yeah, they’re back to the way they were.
Forgive me if I sound like a broken record: The proliferation of bass we had before Hurricane Ida was made possible with the additional viable habitat for them made available by the record amount of river water we had from 2011 to 2020 (which I wrote about extensively here).
I doubt Hurricane Ida had much to do with their decline, no more than previous hurricanes. But that storm does coincide with the same time we stopped having record river water, which I wrote about extensively here.
This is a shining example of Captain Ty Hibb’s Shifting Baseline Theory: a “new normal” arises when people forget how things used to be. All those bass you were catching were never supposed to be there. They were a response to an ecological fluke, and that fluke has been over for a few years now. In their stead, we are catching more croaker, flounder, speckled trout, spanish macks, pompano, channel mullet, etc.
And I’d rather have those fish over bass. I don’t think the bass fishing during the Freshening was that great. Sure, there were 20lb bags caught, but those guys are grinding all day for five fish. We were mostly just catching ditch pickles anyway. To each their own, but if that’s your flavor, then spare yourself the aggravation of salt and just go to the Tennessee River. Catch consistent 3-5lb+ bass deep cranking ledges or skipping docks and you’ll say “f&#k Louisiana!” Or don’t go even that far and head to Lake Okhissa or Percy Quinn in MS and catch three pounders on a multitude of different techniques. Or maybe just the nearest golf course pond.
Now, this is specifically aimed at a general audience reading this because if people don’t know what happened to the bass then they probably don’t know this: I understand that most people catching bass during the Freshening were doing so with a popping cork.
Look back at the Classics during 1999, 2001, 2003 and 2011 (all of which were held in Louisiana). Watch them and you will not see a single one of the field throwing a dumbass popping cork. I know people were catching a lot of smaller bass on them during the Freshening, but that was only because there were literally that many of them.
But if you can flip a Texas Rig, which is the most staple way to catch bass anywhere they swim, then you will catch more quality and quantity. Not cast a Texas Rig. Not tie it on spinning tackle. Flipping with casting tackle.
If you got back into some reeds in Venice with a Texas Rig you stand to demolish the bass. But if you cast a cork at that same spot you’d wonder if they even exist. We smashed them last year. It was easy, but we also know how to work a foot pedal and flip.
Going back to those Classics: they were held at the height of our last Saltening and the year that the Freshening began AKA years we didn’t see bass everywhere in the marsh. But yet those guys were somehow still finding and catching them in places like Venice, Delacroix and Lafitte. I’m not counting Cataouatche because it’s too far inside.
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Thanks for the heads up. It’ll be great when the bridge is finished and hopefully it looks sharp!
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“Am I to idle the whole route? I want to cover water but don’t feel confident hauling ass thru the route. Any advice?”
Yes! What particular location are you talking about? Do you have a screenshot or some coordinates so we can see what this troublesome area is and give you some feedback?
As for idling: it seems like a PITA until after you rip off your lower unit or get hard stuck. I spend a lot of time idling.
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“Is there a 3rd party product I should use or anything else so I can travel confidently thru the route?”
Not if you want to reinvent everything I teach inside Advanced Inshore Navigation. Here are a few shining examples. The cost of learning all that: a few lower units, some dents, the occasional unplanned workout, getting cold, getting wet, lots of down time and thankfully, only hurt pride. It could have been worse.
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Great question.
Navionics is not a map that was painstakingly put together by a cartographer who has been to Louisiana and genuinely cares deeply about your ability to navigate the marsh, much less your fishing trip.
Most maps are compiled from previous data, which is usually sweepingly broad and vague with very little actual detail outside of provided ATONs and known data. Nobody from Navionics is going out there to look to be sure. Instead they’ll just slap a “user beware” warning on their product in tiny text and then market the hell out of it to get you to part with your hard-earned dollars.
This is why satellite (or aerial) imagery is such a big deal: all those details that couldn’t be captured are now mostly captured (and it’s free).
I like to use Navionics web app for its Sonar Chart feature. I cover this inside 101 and the Fishing Trip Resources. I spent more time than anybody in the history of inshore fishing typing that stuff out in a rough draft, reviewing it, editing it, final drafting it, putting it on a teleprompter, filming it, editing it, watching it again just to be sure before finally uploading (and then doing the same thing for the lesson and course framework). So please forgive me if I’m not jumping up and down to re-do all that all over again here in this forum. lol
I really recommend looking at these videos:
Examples of Planning Real Fishing Trips
Those all cover my take on Navionics to some level of detail: that it is only a tool in the toolbox to use with your other tools in the toolbox (such as GED).
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This reply was modified 3 weeks, 2 days ago by
Devin. Reason: added links
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This reply was modified 3 weeks, 2 days ago by
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“It’s almost like this guy knows what he’s talking about.”
Thank you, sometimes I feel like I’m just talking to a computer screen, so it’s great to hear this.
“or even documenting them for myself”
I am guilty of that, too. It’s hard. That’s why I think that, for the long term, it’s better to get back early and write a report, save the GPS tracks, etc.
It’s great to have you back posting here. The fishing is as good and will only get better as it cools off. I also haven’t been on the water, been doing lots of writing, but I am chomping at the bit to get out there and enjoy some TOW.
Thanks for posting an intro!
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Here’s what I got from last year. Anywhere there’s a “stuck” pin is where it got stupid shallow and I got stuck. Now that I’ve looked at these, I think your orange route through “Williams” could be good, just watch out for any shoals from siltation. I think you got this!
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Hey Gene, I’m sorry I didn’t see this sooner. I hope your fishing trip went smoothly. In the future, you gotta give us more notice than the night before.
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If you look at that first lagoon/pond you come into on GED, you will see a duck blind sitting in it. Probably not good to run through once duck season kicks off, or at all, as it could be too shallow at times to reliably run. You didn’t mention why you’re taking this route, where you’re coming from, but if you’re coming from Lake Borgne I would take Grande Bayou or Bayou Biloxi in.
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Hey Pat, very good to have you here. Thanks for saying hi.
You have some good questions but they would really be best served by this community if they were posted as a new post. That’s because when people look at the forum they’re just going to see this post bumped to the top, which is a post about the introduction forum, not about anything navigation.
So all they would see is a post with a title about something regarding introductions and not think that it could have a conversation about navigation.
Please make a new post and we can get you taken care of there. That’s the best way to keep this forum engaging, organized and useful to yourself and to us. Thank you.
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Okay, good to hear. Hopefully I can get out there some time. I could use some TOW to recharge my battery. If/when I do, I will post a report. Thank you!
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I was trying to get there, too! It has to be deep on the backside because it is at one of them north of the West Bay cut. But I just kept running aground lol So I gave up. If there’s a way to get back there without a surface drive, airboat or wings, I do not know it.
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If you mean your #3 pin, locals call that West Bay, or the West Bay Cut. Williams Pass is probably a pass that used to exist but isn’t totally there anymore. That point is ace, but I like to spot lock a little further inside in the middle wherever I see bait balls on the graph.
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“If you look at the imagery from 1/23/24, it looks to have a pretty large boat going through it. So maybe?”
Yes, you are correct, but where the bayou ends is where the silt falls out of suspension and it gets shallow. So inside the bayou you’re probably good, outside of it is when things get sketchy. See my pics posted below.
