This is normally vacation time, but cabin fever has pushed me to take a boat ride a few times this month. Very much still in our typical late winter pattern. Typical catches right now are mixed boxes of drum, hybrid bass, redfish, speckled trout, blue cats, sheephead, flounder, and bass. With the forecast of later February and early March showing temps close to 80 degrees, the spring pattern will develop any day now. Calmer days will find us fishing Lake Pontchartrain catching big trout and bull reds. Redfish will begin migrating into the marshes, spreading out looking for crabs to feast on. Sheephead should be making their way to deeper canals and passes for their spawn. The salinity is still up from the drought last year and this will help keep the trout closer later in Spring and Summer. I’m very much looking forward to spending more time chasing redfish this year after the stocks seemed to drastically improve last fall. Seems as if we have been strictly trout and sheepshead fishing for the last two years. March through May is filling up and I’m looking forward to another great year. I’ve been getting quite a few calls with groups of 5, 9, and more people that want to book a fishing trip and squeeze everyone on to one boat. A typical guide boat is a center console bay boat 24’ in length. Ours is 25’. The captain’s license (OUPV, or “6 pack”) allows us to take up to 6 passengers. Please understand that any captain who is NOT willing to take 5 or 6 anglers, has your best interests in mind. 6 passengers plus the captain on a bay boat means tangled lines, less lines in the water (constantly waiting on the captain), little to no room for comfort, someone is probably going to get hooked, and ultimately less fish are caught. I am more than happy to make exceptions for 5 when it is a family with children. Typically, we do no more than 4 adults to a boat. More than that, we get another boat involved and the boats can stay side by side during the trip so everyone is still together. It may cost $100 more to get that extra boat versus hiring one boat, but I promise it is two completely different experiences.
