by John N. Felsher
LAKE PONTCHARTRAIN
This ancient estuary holds monster trout.
O
n Super Bowl Sunday, Jan. 31 1999, Kenny Kreeger,
with Lake Pontchartrain Charters in Slidell, La.
braved miserable fishing conditions but headed out
into the massive estuary anyway. With the
temperature hovering about 28 degrees and 20-knot winds
whipping the lake, Kreeger pointed his 18-foot skiff toward the
Highway 11 bridge.
Not surprisingly, he found no competition around his
favorite honey holes about halfway across the raging whitecapped Lake Pontchartrain. He flipped a queen-sized soft-plastic
sparkle beetle tipping a 3/8-ounce jighead toward the pilings
holding up this decadesold bridge.
“For some reason, the
fish were just slamming
that day,” Kreeger recalled.
“I already had a bunch of
5- to 6-pound trout in the
box when the big one hit. I
thought it was about a 10pound trout, so I put her in
the livewell, but she went
belly up. I kept fishing and
caught my 25-fish limit
with five trout over six
pounds, eight over five
pounds and the rest over
four pounds. I never caught
a trout under four pounds
that day.”
At the dock, Kreeger’s
trophy weighed 11.99
pounds, the biggest speck seen in Louisiana in 49
years. The fish landed in second place in the record
books behind a 12.38-pounder caught by Leon
Mattes in May 1950, possibly in Lake Pontchartrain.
“Everyone tells me that if I had come straight back
to the marina with that big fish, it would have been
number one instead of number two,” Kreeger lamented.
Kreeger kicked off a trophy trout run in the lake.
Nine months later, Jason Troullier yanked an 11.24pounder from the nearby Rigolets to take the number
three position. In April 2002, Dudley Vandenborre
added a 10.50-pounder to the record books.
Thousands of people drive across bridges
spanning the lake each day, but few probably realize
they pass over some of the best trophy trout waters
in the nation. Lake Pontchartrain formed about 5,000
years ago when silt coming down the Mississippi
River encircled and trapped a section of the Gulf of
Mexico. The 630-square-mile brackish estuary still
indirectly connects to the Gulf through Lake Borgne,
a 162,505-acre bay off the
Gulf, through two deep,
narrow passes, the Rigolets
and Chef Menteur.
The lake averages about
12 to 15 feet deep, but where
the Rigolets enters Lake
Pontchartrain, a giant scour
hole drops to about 100 feet.
Most people fish the
bridges crossing the lake.
These include the Lake
Pontchartrain Causeway,
Interstate 10, U.S. Highway
11 and an ancient railroad
trestle. Each of these bridges
can hold fish, but when it
comes to producing big trout,
the older the better.
“Over the ye