For someone living in south Louisiana I spend quite a bit of time fishing away from the blackwater swamps that occur in our lowlands. Targeting different species, especially our native sunfish, has made fishing these types of locales an absolute necessity and I’m grateful for it! Swamps are awesome! My issue with them is I don’t have a lot of experience with them so I don’t always know the best places to go to target the fish I want to catch and my only means of exploiting these places is on foot or via a kayak, which is limiting. Back in late April I decided to take an exploratory trip, on foot, to an area of the Maurepas Swamp WMA where I had heard a good bit of dollar sunfish were located at. Obviously the dollars were a target species, but I was honestly down for whatever I came across – in fact I brought three fly rods with me from a 1wt to a 7wt just in case.

The Maurepas Swamp WMA is nearly 62,000 acres of public land an hour southeast of Baton Rouge that is as far down in the Amite River basin as you can get. It’s got all the swamp critters and whether you fish or hunt, it’s a good place to spend some time. The water I wanted to target required a short hike in – all the better.

It didn’t take long to start catching fish with the ever-aggressive goggle-eye (warmouth) showing up first. I was surprised by the next species that showed up though and it was a pleasant surprise at the, flier! I had only previously caught these in the Bayou Lacombe watershed so this was a pretty cool find!

It actually turned out that the flier were the dominate species for me on the day. Dollar sunfish never made an appearance. I wasn’t in the same exact place where I had heard they were prevalent, but I figured I was close enough. I also caught a couple smaller largemouth bass that I didn’t bother to take a picture of and saw choupique, but didn’t come away with any. It turned out to be quite the scouting trip and I walked away pretty excited by my local public land find – always great to have those types of places in the rolodex in my mind!