By Capt. James McManus
This is the fishing destination issue and while I love our mountain and piedmont lakes, the lure of different species pulls me pretty hard. My all time favorite place to fish is around the boot of Louisiana on either side of the Mississippi River. Places with names like Delacroix, Hopedale, Houma, Reggio and my favorite…Venice, make my casting arm twitch. These are places that have speckled trout, sheepshead, huge gar and black drum but are best known for that beauty called RED. In North Carolina, they are puppy drum, South Carolina-spottails, but nowhere are they as big or as plentiful as Louisiana redfish. I have been blessed to be sponsored by Firedisc Cookers to fish redfish tournaments on the east coast, Florida, Alabama and Louisiana. My partner, Lou, and I have several top ten finishes out of up to 140 boats but never have won a tournament. Donât feel sorry for me though, and I certainly donât, because every tourney we fish, we get to practice for 4 or 5 days beforehand. This gives me opportunities to search out little jewels, locally called duck ponds that may hold a couple, or a couple of hundred, redfish. We fish out of either my Ranger bay boat or Louâs Shallow Stalker tower boat. Both boats give us elevated stands where we can look down and hopefully sightfish reds with just a flip of a Gulp or a spinnerbait. There is no thrill equal to watching a cruising red stop, tip that tail up and feel that distinctive âTickâ just ahead of your spinning reels drag start to scream. If the weather turns off windy and stormy, which is often the case, we are relegated to fishing popping corks but that brings me back to childhood bream or crappie fishing and watching that cork go down is almost as much fun as a sight bite.
The fact we are tournament fishing adds a twist that amplifies every fish caught. It also increases the pressure to get it right. We lost a tournament once when a worn leader broke at the boat, another we were disqualified from weighing in an oversized fish because we forgot our tail slider which helps pinch your tail consistently. Redfish tournament fishing is a game of parts of ounces and less than 16âs of an inch. Slot fish in Louisiana are 18 to 27 inches and so you try and catch fish as close to 27 as possible. You also look for the dark rusty ones that have fattened up in a little puddle slurping down shrimp, crabs or mullet as they pass within reach. Culling and keeping the right fish alive is an art in itself and my partner and I have lost out when all of these factors werenât aced. A tournament in South Carolina was won by one one hundredth of an ounce, he rolled up his weigh bag from the checker to the weighmaster quicker and lost fewer drops of water off the bag.
Well, enough about the redfish, there are shrimp to be caught with a castnet, a five gallon bucket of shrimp look really tasty after they are deposited in the freezer with no price tag dangling. Appalachicola showed my son, Eric, and I what the word Gator means when talking about seatrout. My friend John, a retired Episcopal priest, showed me that Yankees in Lake Champlain donât have to acquiesce to us southerners when bass fishing and also can add things like pike and muskies to the list. In other words, there are fish everywhere, waiting to be caught, waiting to teach you something else about these creatures that glide in the weightless zones. Get out, and if possible get away from your familiar haunts; there is a whole world of creatures to stretch your string. One of my all time favorite trips was given to me by my beautiful bride several years ago. The Marguiree River in Nova Scotia is famous for itâs run of Atlantic Salmon. We spent five days casting and wading, talking and eating with locals streamside, and in all that, I had one bite, no hookup, just a single sharp tap, but it is still one of my all time favorite trips. Let that be your goal, enjoy without restrictions of winning or connecting, the act of fishing is what you are looking for. Be safe, praise God for all these places and see you down the road, Later, Capt. James
Capt. James McManus is the Owner of 153 Charters. Give him a call for a great day of boat fishing!