February 2016 Marsh & Bayou | Page 43

AS SEEN ON: CATCHING BASS MAKES BETTER INSHORE ANGLERS Our inshore fishery is the greatest in the nation, but it has all of us terribly spoiled. We catch nice coolers of redfish and speckled trout year round. For those of us who are used to doing things a certain way it can be hard to pick up new techniques. Bass fishing helps us overcome that. I laughed. Not at my friend, but at the poor redfish who was minding her own business before getting thwacked in the face by a jighead. Predictably, she shot down the This particular friend is a shoreline in terror, spooking a few of her life long angler of the friends in the process. Louisiana marsh and has We were having a blast, watching all kinds caught speckled trout of fish from the vantage point of the platform and redfish in the past. and catching them. Alas, my poor friend only In fact, he has caught a caught one. It’s not that we didn’t see a good lot of them. The only deal of redfish, we saw 34, it’s just that catchthing is that he has aling them from a stand is slightly technical; it ways caught those fish the same way: using a popping cork with live or dead shrimp. Some- can be more difficult. A lot of my friend’s casts were like the one that hit the redfish in times he would throw artificial lures but althe forehead: they were too close or too far ways with the same basic retrieve. away, rarely were they on the money. He was “There’s one,” I’d say as I subtly pointed accustomed to cork