Louisiana: Round 2 - FIGHT!

Well once again we decided to take a trip to the land of giants… and once again we had an absolutely epic time down in Louisiana. Seven guys, three skiffs, a cross country plane ride, a drive through Texas, mustache mania and plenty of Redbull, sounds like a good time right?

For this years trip we settled on fishing mid-November which seems to be a popular time period. We know its a year-round fishery but with everyones schedules, the “fall break” time period seems to work well for us. The traditional prep for a week but scramble last minute to load up the truck routine was in order of course, why do it ahead of time and be prepared… pshhhhh. The skiff is hooked up, rods loaded in, PLENTY of ice cold beer in way to many coolers and Swiss Rolls were a must. Oh it’s 9:30 pm and we’re leaving at midnight, yeah lets just lay in bed and look at Instagram until the alarm we don’t need goes off. IT’S TIME TO ROLL!!

The group of us who were driving met at our normal meeting spot around zero dark thirty, that would be our local gentlemen’s club of course. It has a big parking lot for us to meet… don’t get any ideas. A couple trucks meet there and start our forever long drive down south. One feller from the group has his military ball earlier that night so he had already hit the road and was catching some much need zzzz’s at some sketchy truck stop in South Carolina trying to fight off the lot lizard’s asking for a quick dollar. Coffee, some more coffee, don’t for the Redbull and beef jerky and then the mandatory 27 Waffle House stops to fuel the body. Keep on truckin’ boys, we’re headed southbound and down to the land of giants.

AAAAAAANNNNND fast forward to the good stuff, who needs to hear about driving 19 hours and having the lottery winning discussion over and over (highly recommend). Day one starts, it’s early, like wish I was still asleep early but the fish don’t sleep… well maybe but we don’t care. The first day was all about finding clean water. We were on a little bit of a struggle bus there for a second but found some nice upper slot fish. After sacrificing M&M’s to the fish Gods, we began to find a few monsters lurking far off the the banks, but we also found the sun was setting so we marked our spots for day 2 and headed home to tell lies and stories to the other guys.

DAY 2 is when the magic happened. We had spent the evening searching for a good spot to start based off of day one. We were dealing with a bit more wind that day, which was AMAZING to pole the skiff in, but it happens. We had worked this bank several times making different tracks further off the bank and when I had just about had an absolute enough of that nonsense, we decided to let the wind drift us down one last stretch. Then BOOM… dreams came true. We found a group of several hundred monsters floating high and happy making laps and eating anything from bottle caps to ham sandwiches. Our GPS looked like Daytona Speedway from making laps on those fish, we appropriately named that spot, “The Racetrack”.

The next couple days we explored new area’s we hadn’t been to in the past and found some amazing fish. We caught some fantastic reds, black drum and some pretty sheepies on flies that you’d think were for Musky, but they didn’t seem to mind. Other’s in the group found lone coyote’s willing and ready for a beef jerky snack, we listened to shrimp boat radio to where “Pee-Pee ain’t got no skrimp” and he’d “catch up with Ray Ray at the boat ramp”. We also spent a lot of time on google trying to figure out what a “pick’n rig” was because some giant creepy crawly broke one off and someone needed another. I’m still confused on what that was all about.

I look forward to this trip all year, not just for the amazing fishing but for the stories we get and memories that are made. It’s just a group of us anglers who all somewhat enjoy each others company, or lie to each other and secretly hate someone, but still want to fish… maybe, I hope not. I’m counting down the days until the next trip for sure either way.

I know it’s just a brief run through of the trip, but to understand what that place is like, you have to try it for yourself. If you have any questions or want to know more, I’m happy to tell you everything I have no clue about. Just give me a call or shoot me an email… the contact info is on the site.

#twohaul