I’ll tell you right now that for the past two weeks, my fishing team and I have found the fishing to be absolutely great!!! But we also found that the catching has been unbelievably horrible.
“From the technical point of view, that's not going to change any time soon. . . at least not until the water temperature climbs above 64 degrees for three days in a row!” my Pontchartrain fishing guide Capt. Kenny Kreeger explained.
“Frank, make no bones about it, the fish are still there, scattered across the Louisiana coastline. They haven't gone anywhere just because the water temperature got cold. It's just that, like the water they swim in, they're just so darn cold they refuse to be active enough to feed.
“But not to worry - here’s the good news: they're gonna have to eat again soon. So keep an eye on the weathercasters and when they tell you that the water is gonna warm up, especially for several days in row, it’s gonna force them to get after a meal immediately. . .and every fishermen who will be "out there waiting" will be in for some of the best angling action they’ve seen in a long time.
“So watch the thermometer!
Capt. Kenny actually picked up the reins today after a moment’s notice when my regularly scheduled trip with Capt. Ahab at Delacroix bombed out. As usually, Kenny exerted ever effort to find enough fish for us to shoot the fishing show. But hard as he tried, from 7 am until noon when we quit, all we put in the boat was one. . .snagged. . .mullet!
That was the story for the past two weeks all across my regular fishing haunts.
“Water way too cold, Frank—don’t even come down! Ahab said from Delacroix.
“We coulda stayed inside the marina this morning,” Capt. Ryan Folse told me last week at Cocodrie.
“Frank, I don’t think you’re gonna do much better here than you’d do anywhere else,” Capt Phil Robichaux reluctantly admitted last night when I called him at Lafitte.
“If I was you, Frank,” Capt. John Aucoin told me from Golden Meadow,
”I’d check with some of the other guys (meaning my team of TV fishing guides). Water is way to cold and low here to do any good, and if we did find any warmer water I doubt that we’d be able to coax them into a bite. It’s so dirty it’s like chocolate milk.”
But so much for the bad news. Thankfully it’s only temporary. It’s only gonna be a matter of time (maybe only a day or two) before we can all head back out to our favorite locations and—as my fishin’ buddy at Shell Beach likes to say - tear ‘em up! As of this hour, because the fish have been as cold as the water they’re in, and because as of this morning that temperature was a bone-chilling 41 degrees, these fish - every species - haven’t fed, because they get exceptionally sluggish when they get that cold and their metabolism shrinks to almost nothing and they just don’t sense hunger.
“But it’s gonna be any day now when they’re gonna be ravenous hungry” Capt. Kenny said, almost as if he were divulging an earth-shattering secret. “And Frank, when that happens, I wanna be out here. Cuz I’m gonna smoke ‘em, buddy!”
I think I wanna be out there when that happens, too!
Frank D
