Louisiana River Bassin
This report is from October 2009. Hopefully it will give yall a sneak peek at what kind of my local wade fishing world, more specifically north of Lake Pontchartrain, east of the Mississippi River, south and west of the state line.
September was a busy month for me, I guess getting married will do that, it had been a while since I made a river trip. I woke up at 8:30 this morning and checked the weather, it looked like I would have a few hours before I got rained out. The local gauges had shown a spike on most rivers earlier that week, so I was unsure of what they would look like. So I headed out hoping to find some good looking water.
I went to my normal haunt, the river was stained, but fishable. The level was fine for wading, so I started flinging the buggy whip.
The fish weren't as active as they were during summer, but I did fool a few. I tied on a prince nymph under my popper to increase my catch and the longears and bluegills attacked it with gusto. Soon after the heavens opened up and forced me off the river, just as I had expected.
So I headed to the FJ, noticed it was only 12:30 and decided to scout some creeks I had not yet been to, but seen on a map and on Google Earth. The rains let up as I made it to my first stop, so I got out and checked out the creek. It looked surprisingly clear for the amount of rain we'd had in the past week. It looked too shallow though to hold many fish, but it's width told a different story. I went back to the FJ, grabbed my fly rod, and decided to head upstream.
The stream was beautiful, more so than the local flow I always head to. It was a typical Florida parish stream with a sand and gravel bottom, however it also had sections of hard clay bottom. In those sections there were small rapids and the clay bottom was riddled with potholes and drainage patterns - it looked really cool. There were also numerous bluffs along the sides of the creek which made you realize that the terrain here was atypical of south Louisiana, also very cool.
The creek was pretty shallow in stretches and I had to do a lot of walking to find the good holes, however when I did find the deeper sections, they produced. In one hole I must have caught a dozen bass, just tossing the popper across the stream and popping it back to me. The bass would come up from the bottom and nail it and if it wasn't a bass it was a bluegill or a longear taking the nymph, and once they were hooked the bass would come take swipes at them, sometimes hooking themselves on the popper. It started raining and it didn't even matter, the fishing was too good for me to turn around and head home. As long as there was no lightning I was fine. After that hole I pushed on upstream and caught a few more in random deeper spots. At about 4pm the weather began to look very ominous, so I decided to turn around. Sure enough on my walk back I got poured on. I was happy though, it was great to be on a river again. I can't wait to explore that creek some more.
