Challenging December
Keith Lusher Jr Fluctuating temperatures, wind, and fog has anglers perplexed on which days to take to the water. With a little game-planning, fisherman are still finding a way to put fish in the boat even during the small windows of opportunity that December has provided so far. As the saltwater bite wanes, the bass bite along the Northshore’s rivers and bayous has picked up considerably.
Bayou Bonfouca
One of the least fished bayous on the Northshore, Bayou Bonfouca is slowly becoming one of the best bass fishing destinations for wintertime bass. Ronald Pierre recently made a trip to Bonfouca in hopes of getting in on some of the hot bass action that December has been providing. “The temps were hovering in the upper 20's and I had to grab and extra sweatshirt out of the truck before jumping into the boat. After getting to our first spot we noticed how low the tide was and there was almost no tide movement at all. The water was completely glassed over and the banks and roof tops were lined with a thick blanket of frost.” Ronald said it didn’t take them long to haul in their first fish of the day. “We set up at the mouth of the bayou we were fishing and start chunking lipless cranks to the deep ditches and drops. A few casts in and KAWHAM, a nice bass crushes my lure! I set the hook and a nice largemouth becomes airborne. I notice that it only had 1/3 of a treble hook that stuck into the fish so I gently played the hard fighting bass to the boat and around the motor, keeping it away from the propeller. I got down to lip the fish and we had our first keeper of the day on board, a chunky 2 pounder.” Ronald said the fish that day were very active and felt like fish that he normally catches in warmer water. “As cold as it was with air temps in the upper 20's and water temps in the upper 50's, the bass were very active and fighting like it was summertime.” They ended the day with a 2 person limit of 20 chunky bass.
Lemo's Reef
The artificial reef out of Madisonville is producing solid specks right now. Baton Rouge residents Miriam and Rex Davey recently made the trip down to the Northshore to do some fishing in Lake Pontchartrain and decided to give the reef a try. “We'd never fished Lemo's Reef but wanted to try it out before the truly cold and nasty winter weather set in.” Miriam said. She and her husband launched out of Marina Del Ray in the Tchefuncte River and made the two mile voyage straight out into the lake where the reef is located. “We made it to the reef through heavy fog around noon. Incredibly enough one other boat was already there. He pulled up a nice speck a few minutes after we arrived.” Miriam says that they had to search for them a while but after manning the trolling motor a while they found them. “We trolled around a bit just to see what showed up on the fish finder. While trolling along the bottom we looked at the fish finder and bam! A bite! We boated a nice speck! So, either the fish turned on a little, or we finally found the right structures and presentations.” Miriam says they had their best results using a wintertime favorite pink colored shad. “The trout seemed to prefer the pink, soft plastic bait with a chartreuse tail. I topped mine with a chunk of fresh frozen market shrimp and used a very light jig head with a real slow presentation, dragged slowly along the bottom. For our lines we used braided line and an 18" monofilament leader attached with a barrel swivel. We worked bait along with the tide. Bumping it along the bottom then letting it sit still every few seconds. We ended up with 15 very nice, solid, meaty trout in the box with three of them weighing in at 2 lbs. Not bad for one afternoon an hour's drive from home!”
Tournament Results
The 2013 RP3 Bass King Tournament on Bayou Liberty is in the books and it was Richard Bennett who took home the title with a 5-fish limit weighing in at 8 lbs. even. In second was Ricky Benitez with a limit of 7 lbs., 8 oz. Joe Picone won third with a 4-fish bag that weighed 6 lbs., 14 oz.
