Roadside Scouting Success

Just before things got serious with Hurricane Ida I was able to squeeze in a last minute scouting trip to a few roadside spots north of Lake Pontchartrain. This trip was supposed to be a wade fishing trip to one of my favorite streams with a brief roadside stop on the way to try and catch a new species to me, but the weather that day made me call an audible.

I pulled up at my first stop as the skies opened up and began casting my fly into a hole where a tannic stream poured out of a set of culverts that ran under the highway. I worked the hot head damsel fly from one side of the hole to the other and I tried to work it from the top down because in some spots the deeper I let it drop the easier it was to get hung up. Here’s what I found:

The grass pickerel was the species I was after so I was pretty pumped to catch one at the first stop. The flier was a surprise bonus catch and as an unabashed sunfish nerd I was thrilled to land it as well. I knew they existed in South Louisiana somewhere, but I really had no idea where I needed to go to target them because I never hear anything from other anglers about them. In the Freshwater Fishes of Louisiana book by Dr. Neil H. Douglas, their range map says they exist statewide, but that to me is extremely vague and unhelpful. I may be asking too much of a nearly 50 year old book. I ended up catching three flier which tells me that they are at least established at this spot and should be a clue as to what type of habitat I should have been looking for them in all along.

I ended up fishing here longer than I thought I would because I was catching fish in the rain and frankly that’s better than not catching fish in the rain. All good things come to an end though and when things shut down I moved on to spot two. Spot two came on the recommendation of Chris Williams as the place I needed to go to target the grass pickerel and my whole reason for making a side trip here in the first place. He had added them to his species list for the RSFF Jambalaya Challenge and never having seen one before I was curious about them, so he passed on the knowledge to me. For that I’m very appreciative – anglers helping anglers, got to love it.

This spot was very similar to the first as it was a deep spot in a tributary, right off the highway. I worked it similarly and soon was rewarded with fish.

Another mixed bag, no flier this time, but a few more grass pickerel, with the last one being pretty respectable, trending toward the max of their length. You got to watch those pickerel as they do have teeth and if they hit a fly up toward the line you may not get that fly back. I lost a couple flies to teeth while targeting them on this trip. They hit a fly like any Esox, they T-bone it, and I had a little trouble securing the hook up early on with them. I caught enough of them though that I wasn’t kicking myself over it.

After getting my fill of pickerel I picked up and moved on down the road. The rain wasn’t letting up and I spent a little too much time at each of these first two stops to go wade fish a stream now, especially one that may or may not get blown out with all the rain, so I opted to keep on spot hopping and scout a few more different roadside spots in the area.

The rain had made the day’s fishing tougher than it had to be and by the time I was ready to drive home I was sufficiently soaked. I caught a few fish here and there, no more new species to report, but found some good looking water. No spot was as productive as the first two. Also the more time I spent listening to the radio in the truck between spots the bleaker the forecast looked with Hurricane Ida. The track continued to jog westward toward Baton Rouge so I eventually decided I needed to head home. We needed to make a family decision as to what our plan was in regards to riding out the storm.

I’ll have more on that in another post, but know that our household and family made it through Hurricane Ida just fine. We were very lucky as there were many people in south Louisiana that were impacted and continue to be impacted by that storm to this day. It was a monster and one of those life changing events for some folks.