[littoralminded]

Wow!

So – I hadn’t planned to fish, but left Eden Isles (at the crack of 11:15 am) on Wednesday for the same reason; light winds, clear skies, huge outgoing tide, etc.… I followed a boat out onto the lake and saw that they were off to fish the bridges, and wondered about that as I turned east toward The Rigolets. There were some great catches on the bridges back around Thanksgiving, but I figured the trout had surely moved on by now – and then I saw my water temperature gauge reading 62-63 degrees, about the same as Thanksgiving week, and started to second-guess that idea. I had a fairly good day – boated 14 specks and a few white trout, caught a 19” hammer on the very first cast, scouted out some new spots – but now I’m kicking myself for turning left instead of right coming out of Eden Isles. Congratulations on a truly epic trip!!!

[littoralminded]

Great report, Daniel – and another good trip with some quality fish, thanks!

[littoralminded]

Counterfeit Pass at the Goose Pond can also be good – there’s a deep bend where the pond drains out into Counterfeit Pass. I usually position the boat just downstream of the cut and jig the bottom, but on good tide days you may see some surface activity as well.

[littoralminded]

Welcome Jamie!

[littoralminded]

Wow, awesome haul of gorgeous trout, thanks for sharing… 👍🏼

[littoralminded]

I’m going tomorrow, too – and in the same general area…

I see you’ve got the mouth of Big Magill Bayou at Chef Pass marked for tomorrow. If you are there maybe check out the waterway crossing just north of the Chef. The bayou is deep and has some bends and a deep intersection that may hold trout now that the temperatures are really dropping.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 6 days ago by  littoralminded.

[littoralminded]

Thanks Daniel,

Very good report, and you’re right – these days a 17” fish is a ‘hammer’, and I suppose a 20” fish is a ‘maul’ (your biggest is more of a ‘sledgehammer’). All are rare, with the over-20” fish even more so – thanks for releasing them…

[littoralminded]

I’ve managed only four trout over 20” this year. My largest was a fish slightly over 21” in length, but absolutely enormous in girth. She was caught in early May at the Lake Borgne Block-22 gas platform (the large structure in the north part of the lake). This fish was the only one of the over-20” trout I kept – and she weighed nearly 4-1/2 pounds on my (genuine) Boga-Grip spring scale – after spending all night in the ice chest…

• This reply was modified 2 weeks ago by  littoralminded.

[littoralminded]

I went today, and fished the Trestles on the Orleans Parish side. I was there 2-1/2 hours on a big falling tide and caught only five trout. I had quite a bit of company out there, even at mid-week. The fish were all keepers, up to 18”, but very hard to come by. My temperature gauge said surface temperatures were 54° to 56°F today. Does that sound right? Winter is coming…

[littoralminded]

Wow… I’ve fished fairly often in 2024, and have four fish over 20” all year – with perhaps another dozen or so over 17”. You pretty much equaled that in one morning – great day and really good report, thanks!

[littoralminded]

Just back from the annual Thanksgiving journey to the family compound (which is at Lake Fork, with a nice 21’ Ranger sitting on the lift, but so cold and windy I never wet a line), looking for Lake Pontchartrain basin info – that is NOT about fishing the bridges with 200 other boats. This is an epic report – many thanks, Daniel!

[littoralminded]

This is a really great report, even if the fishing wasn’t the best. The bigger specks hanging around the Rock Dam matches my own experience a few weeks back… Thank you!

• This reply was modified 1 month ago by  littoralminded.

[littoralminded]

Sounds like a really great trip – huge kudos for setting up the trip for success with a three year-old, not an easy thing to do.

P.S. Star Bayou, just around the tip of Alligator Pount on the northeast side, is one of my favorite fall locations when the shrimp are running, thinking this had to be somewhere nearby. I saw both jacks and bull reds (though not together) tearing something up out in Lake Borgne on Friday (10/25), though I was in the northern part of the lake…

[littoralminded]

Yes, the boat lives on a lift out behind the house, so my fishing trips all begin and end at my back door and I’m limited to fishing areas that can be reached from Eden Isles. (This is still a huge area, and I have made journeys up to 170 miles round-trip in the summer, but these are very draining – both physically and financially…) I hope to have my trailer back in road-worthy condition by springtime and expand my horizons in 2025.

On the other point, if I DID somehow outfish you on this one single day, it’s honestly only because of what I’ve learned from you. When I returned to Louisiana a couple of years ago I considered myself a good angler. I had decades of experience with bass fishing and with both inshore and offshore saltwater fishing. I was very good at the craft: casting, knots and rigging, lure selection, presentation techniques, boat handling and navigation, all that stuff. I also had some knowledge of fish habitats and behavior. But I had no idea how to use the various information resources to put together a trip plan, only a vague understanding of the life cycle of trout and redfish, didn’t really understand how seasonal changes affected them, was always mystified by tides and currents in the marsh, etc. In other words, I didn’t know what I didn’t know… Thank you for showing me how all the pieces fit together. I know it has helped me catch more fish, and is more satisfying to approach fishing from a basis of knowledge and understanding.

[littoralminded]

Thanks Devin,

I started getting some weird “transducer overheat” messages on my sonar unit this summer. The messages were intermittent, usually happening late in the day after the unit had been running for several hours. Anyway, I learned that the root cause of the this problem is usually that the transducer temperature sensor had failed, or is starting to go out. I haven’t seen this message since early September, and my sensor obviously isn’t completely dead, but it could very well be reading too low, so I appreciate the insight…