We reached the jetties around 3:00 PM yesterday thinking we'd work the crowd fishing the pier and rocks asking to weigh and measure their fish, but to our surprise there were only a few stragglers fishing the pier, almost no one on the rocks, and only a few trailers in the boat ramp parking lot. After speaking to a kind gentlemen in the parking lot who told us exactly where to find the bull redfish, we decided to skip the creel survey, launch the boat and go after them. When we got outside the western cut, the tide was just going slack but my younger son managed to boat a bull redfish and my older son boated what looks to be a top ten gafftopsail catfish in the LA record books (both on cracked crab). It may have been the dolphins rather than the slack tide that turned off the fishing.
After an hour or so of nothing, we moved back inside to fish in the outgoing current. We found a nice spot on the slope of the western side of the channel about 100-200 yards north of the channel marker about at the northern end of the jetties, and a few hundred yards south of a popular wading spot. It was probably about 6 pm when my daughter's crab took off at a high rate of speed, and after a marvelous fight we boated a beautiful bull red. Soon after that, my older son was fighting with his and I was the only angler in the boat without a redfish.
Then two of my crabs began moving away from the boat at a high rate of speed about the same time. It happened so fast that we still had the two bulls the children had caught laying in the bottom of the boat with hooks in their mouths. After a couple of lines crossing each other and the anchor line (passing rods under the anchor rope as needed), I finally pulled a big black drum out of the water and then the bull redfish decided to get wrapped up in the anchor line. My son pulled in the anchor line to where the line was wrapped and a few passes of the rod around the line had the fish freed up and it was game on again. After a couple more runs, this one was out of steam and in the boat. Good times!
It was a true pleasure to be fishing with my children yesterday, and they had all three commented after the first bull redfish and the gafftop that even if we didn't catch any more, it would be a great day fishing. To end up with three more bull redfish and a monster black drum was truly a blessing, and my children handled some tricky situations with calm, patience and skill, everyone working like a well oiled machine getting lines out of the way and working to get lines unwrapped from each other and from the anchor rope.
05-26-2013, 04:33 AM
Calcasieu Pass Jetties 5/25/2013 Bull Reds on Fire
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