If you're going to be fishing Lake Pontchartrain, don't count on any speckled trout for a while, but we've got plenty other fish. Redfish are stacked up.
"Man, it's the year of the redfish! Everywhere you go there's redfish," said Capt. Deadly Dudley Vandenborre of Captain Dudley's Charters. "A lot of small redfish, a few decent keepers in them. You saw today how many redfish we caught and when it hits the fall, all those will be legal too."
You can tell from that river water, it doesn't even look like a redfish. All that river water washes them out. Should you pick out structure, should you fish fish pilings, bridges or the shorelines to find them?
"Well right now they're just in the cuts where they've got a little bit of dropoff, you know deep water relatively near it. And they're ganged up, they're schooled up pretty thick," said Dudley.
When redfish are biting fast and furious, it's easy to lose count. It's important to remember there's a five fish limit between sixteen and twenty-seven inches and only one of those five over twenty-seven.
"You can use live bait. You can throw Dudleys," Dudley said. "We were catching today with that new color, it worked out really really well. I had that one double, but when you get into them it really doesn't matter, they hit anything. The Slamming Sammys work good, the Bay Chovy. It's a good time to take a charter and bring some kids with you you saw I had my grandson today he had a ball catching them."
It may be a while before the speckled trout return in any concentration, but until then there's plenty of redfish to have a lot of fun with.