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“Question for yall is do the reds move more into the ponds later in the summer? We covered a ton of water and expected to see more reds. Should we abandon the interior freshwater ponds as most of the reds we have caught blind casting have been closer to the lake edge?”
There just hasn’t been a lot of redfish. The redfish population has taken a wild hit. It’s a factual reality we are living in backed up by lots of sight fishing reports (found on this forum, but those I also get from guides who are sight fishing for them). Also backed up by science from LDWF. Has been for awhile now.
Even the dead-shrimp have been having a tough time with the reds, and they’re fishing for them in the easiest way possible.
I have no idea what the bowfishing guides are doing, you can check their social media to see. I imagine that if running fish down and shooting them is the only way to limit out, then we are in hard times.
A couple years ago when I put my sight fishing rig back together, I fished everywhere from Lake Pontchartrain’s ponds to Biloxi Marsh to Delacroix to Pointe a la Hache, on down to Buras and even in Houma and came away with pretty sad numbers.
In Houma we did best, but practically all the fish were overs.
I’m comfortable saying that what you’ve experienced isn’t a matter of figuring out when redfish move into ponds (spoiler alert: they’re always in ponds) but that there are no redfish in ponds because there aren’t that many to go around.
Not that a mother lode doesn’t exist out there, but that there aren’t as many mother lodes as there used to be.
This is the result of the Freshening and increased pressure on redfish, as well as Louisianans need to kill/eat everything they come across.
That’s just where we are. I wish it weren’t the case, I’d rather have beautiful ponds loaded with redfish.
The guides who are catching them tend to do so with dead shrimp under a cork or fishing deeper. I’m 99% positive that’s what the Venice guides are doing.
