[cliffhall]

Great effort out there! My last trip to hopedale looked a lot like that. If you like plastics on the 1/8oz jig heads then you may like the Slick and Slick Jr rigged weedless. Hook up ratio goes a bit down but I feel like bigger trout hang tight to any rock in the MRGO South of the dam.

[cliffhall]

Great report and good job of catching a couple at every spot. There is something satisfying about that.

[cliffhall]

Riptide Terrova user here with no complaints. I also use the remote version, for the reasons you mentioned above, and love it. Just keep extra AAA batteries in your boat for the remote and you should never have any problems with that thing.

[cliffhall]

Love this kind of stuff. I was just watching a Lost Louisiana documentary on Grand Isle. Will definitely check this out as well.

I’m sure it’s been talked about here already but I just bought the book Rising Tide to learn a little more about the Mississippi. Keep posting any other stuff you come across

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by  cliffhall.

[cliffhall]

Well done, Ryan.

You certainly earned every single fish you caught last weekend. Great job on making things work and grinding it out in some tough conditions.

[cliffhall]

Would it be possible to use one starlink for your home and fishing trips? Obviously you’d have to pick one or the other at any given time but that would be nice to have out there.

[cliffhall]

Excellent job of having back to back successful trips to Venice! Not gonna lie, all of you Venice Conquistadors have inspired me to start learning Venice this upcoming fall. I’ll blame you guys if my wife starts complaining of longer trips lol.

[cliffhall]

Nothing will drive you crazier than trying to get into the head of a trout but I think you can trust your intuition on this one. Those big trout know they have to feed before or after their brains click into spawning mode. Jon Miller did a seminar one time talking about how laws of conservation of energy apply to trout behavior. Any animal will die if they expend more energy than they intake. Spawning requires a lot of energy, both to produce the eggs and the spawning process, so fish need to load up around spawning periods.

That’s one reason I think we don’t see Texas or Florida sized speckled trout here. Our trout have to cover large areas and evade predators throughout the year where some of the best big trout fisheries in the world (Guana River, IRL, Mosquito Lagoon, Baffin, Rockport) have trout populations that spawn and feed year round in the same bays.

[cliffhall]

Can’t tell if you were responding to me or not but Ty Hibbs is someone to talk to about Redfish in Louisiana. He has a podcast called “The Redfish Podcast”. His general thoughts are that it’s due to overfishing in those areas. A lot of guides switched their business model to specifically target reds when trout fishing got tougher during the freshening.

[cliffhall]

You make a good point and I do agree that throwing bigger baits can help you weed out smaller fish. Having said that, I do think there are times where sizing down is actually more effective when targeting bigger fish. Big Trout legends like Jay Watkins out of Rockport, Tx or Matt Chipperfield out of Jacksonville, FL preach this a lot. I know those are very different fisheries but I hear the same things from my fishing mentors. Like all rules with trout, you can throw a big “Depends” into any of these points. Matching the hatch and knowing conditions are important no matter what you are targeting.

I also agree that location is the most important factor in all of this. I’m limited by a smaller boat so I have to look outside of what is probably the best big trout fishing areas in the state: Outside Rigs and Islands. I think having an understanding that all things are relative really helps me keep my head in the game. I can’t compare myself to the Carter brothers in Venice when I mostly fish Lake P, Bievenue, and the Hopedale area. It’s just like the idea that a big buck in Louisiana would be laughable in OK or Kansas. Even the big trout in Venice are just a decent fish south of Corpus, Tx or the Guana River, Indian River, and Mosquito Lagoon in FL. Those trout you caught are hammers for those areas.

[cliffhall]

It’s wild to me that not that long ago (relatively) I’d launch a kayak from Sweetwater and go catch 30ish reds in a day. We had one summer-fall way on our duck lease in braithwaite where 42 redfish was the least amount we caught all season. My fly fishing buddies would go back there and see hundreds. Have caught a handful of rat reds in the few trips I’ve tried the last few years.

[cliffhall]

I always say that figuring trout out is like playing chess in a blender that’s in a tornado. There are certainly rules to this game but one of those rules is the trout will sometimes say frick all of the other rules and do whatever they want that day. No man on this planet will ever master trout, indefinitely, and especially in LA waters. That still won’t stop us from obsessing over every fraction of a percentage all the way up to 99.99% mastery.

[cliffhall]

I would most likely only take it on trips where I’m going to Venice, Breton, or the Chandys, so maybe that would be doable.

How packable is the Mini? I don’t have a ton of room on my skiff. Is it pretty easy to set up on a boat?

[cliffhall]

I’d be down. I dont really care for any non speckled trout fish but the trip wouldn’t have to be planned around my interest, obviously. I’m just slowly starting to concede that if I’m going to primarily target big trout in Louisiana then I gotta go where they are so it’s time to start learning all that I can about Venice.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by  cliffhall.

[cliffhall]

Well done. Gladiator is one of my favorites.

Also, when are we getting the LAFB Elite sponsored house boat in Venice? If we are gonna take over the place then let’s do it right