Speckled trout crazy close to Lafitte marinas

(AP) — Growing up as a youngster in Westwego, Capt. Chad Daigle was a Boy Scout lifeguard, and swam a one-mile course four times.
That being the case, Daigle likely wouldn’t have much trouble doing the breast stroke from his hub at Lafitte Harbor Marina to one of the hottest speckled-trout destinations along the Louisiana coast right now. For the last few weeks, the abandoned rice farm known as the Pen has been packed with fish — and almost as many boats on weekend days.
“This past weekend, it was unbelievable,” Daigle said. “Coming across the Goose Bayou bridge, 7:30 in the morning, you could look across the Pen, and it looked like you could hop from boat to boat. It doesn’t take long for word to get out.”
The anglers are coming for two things: convenience and big, fat fillets.
“It’s close to the marina, you don’t have to burn a lot of gas, and it’s full of fish,” Daigle said. “With the amount of trout we’ve been seeing the last few weeks in the Pen, it’s a no-brainer. It’s the first place you want to stop. You catch fish, and there’s no reason to venture any farther.”
It was Daigle’s first stop on a Wednesday morning trip out of his bustling marina. A light northeasterly breeze tickled the tops of the cord grass, and cold, but not frigid, air made for a bundled boat ride for Daigle and buddy Kevin Ford.
Fortunately, it was an absurdly short one.
Daigle could have started anywhere in the Pen, but because of the direction of the breeze, he motored across the rectangular water body to a shallow pocket along the eastern shore. He eased in, lowered his trolling motor and began a lazy drift south.
Several minutes in, Daigle was fishless, and he knew exactly why. He had started his drift a hair too far north, in an area that was free of submerged aquatic vegetation. Lately, that’s been the surest way to not catch a thing.
“The one constant that we’re having right now in all the locations we’re fishing — from the Pen all the way to Brusle Lake — is grass,” Daigle said. “We’re not seeing a ton of bait, but the fact the fish are only in the grass leads me to believe the grass is holding bait, and that’s what the trout are after.”
Daigle kept drifting and casting until his cork-suspended lemonhead Matrix Shad came back with a long string of coontail hanging like spaghetti from his jighead. Filled with anticipation, he and Ford worked their corks more vigorously, and the orange and yellow orbs of Styrofoam began sinking below the surface, yanked down by speckled trout that didn’t need to be measured. Some were as large as 19 inches.
That’s been the rule lately in the region, Daigle said.
“The last couple years, we’ve been seeing the upward trend of trout being bigger than what we’re accustomed to down here in Lafitte,” he said. “Early in the year, we were catching a bunch of small fish — catching 70 to keep 30 — but this run over the last four or five weeks, it’s been the opposite.”
Daigle’s strategy of drifting and trolling to find the fish is the only way to have a productive outing in the Pen. Anchor-chuckers have as much success there as the Saints in the Superdome.
“What we’re seeing is you get into a little pocket of them,” Daigle said. “You’ll drift a hundred yards and won’t get a bite, and then all of a sudden, you pick up four or five fish, and you drift another hundred yards without a bite, and the same thing happens.
“From what we’ve seen so far this year, you want to keep moving.”
That’s MUCH easier to do during the week than it is on the weekends. While Daigle and Ford fished the area Wednesday, only two or three other boats were in the Pen. Light pressure allows anglers to repeat drifts on productive stretches, and it also puts the fish in a more cooperative mood.
On Saturdays, Sundays and even Fridays, the place can look like a shopping-mall parking lot on Christmas Eve.
“The Pen is a decent-sized water body, but when you get that much pressure catching that many fish, it slows them down,” Daigle said. “You’re much better off coming during the week. You don’t have the competition, and you have a lot more freedom to fish more area.
“You get a lot of jockeying for position when you’re dealing with that many boats.”
But, of course, some anglers have no choice but to fish during weekend days since they work all week. To have success even with all the fishing pressure, Daigle recommends avoiding the more-popular shorelines, and fishing the middle of the water body.
“The whole Pen fishes the same way because of its flat depth,” he said. “It’s not a place that’s going to give you a big rise or fall as far as the bottom topography. You’ll have grass beds in the middle of the Pen, just like you have along the shorelines.”
Most of the Pen is flat, featureless and 4 feet deep, Daigle said.
“There was some dredging done here a couple years ago. They pulled some stuff out of the middle of the Pen,” he said. “That made a deeper hole there, but that stuff silts in quickly.”
Whether along the shorelines or in the middle, the best way to fish the Pen is typically with a soft-plastic suspended by a cork. Daigle’s two favorites as of late have been a glow/chartreuse split-tail beetle and a lemonhead Matrix Shad.
His last two trips out, however, the fish seemed to bite better on tight-lined soft-plastics, including a Usual Suspect swimbait and a chartreuse curl-tail Gulp. The most-effective technique, Daigle said, is to run them just above the grass beds, and add subtle twitches here and there.
Such good action so close to home has been like manna from heaven for Daigle and the anglers who fish out of his marina.
“We weren’t sure if we were even going to see trout in the Pen this year, as scarce as they were early in the year,” Daigle said. “That’s when you normally start seeing some trout in the Pen, and we weren’t seeing them. Then all of a sudden — bam! — they’re here.
“It was like a magic wand or somebody wished upon a star, and they were here.”
Just a short boat ride — or long swim — from his marina.