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D’Arbonne’s Daffy Divers

April 1, 2012 Jerald Horst

It was late evening in the early summer. The five men assembled on the back deck of the Petrus family camp, set on a hill slope overlooking Lake D’Arbonne, were engaged in a masculine redneck ritual. Bobby Petrus, a.k.a. “The Claw,” was grilling meat, and all of them were exchanging humorous insults.

The rough-and-tumble humor, mixed with an equal blend of braggadocio and self-deprecation, was delivered with powerful North Louisiana twangs in what a Cajun or a New Orleanian would consider a foreign language.[…]

Bass Fishing

Teche Talk

April 1, 2012 John Flores

Bayou Teche starts in Port Barre and runs 125 miles to the Atchafalaya River in Berwick Bay. But it’s the 8- to 9-mile stretch of bayou between the East Calumet Spillway locks and the Berwick Bay Locks at the Atchafalaya River that competitive anglers know is the place where they can always find five good fish to put on the scale.[…]

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Davis Pond Speck Effect

April 1, 2012 Chris Ginn

While telling me about how the Davis Pond Diversion has affected speckled trout fishing around Lafitte, Capt. Theophile Bourgeois mentioned something that I don’t think he realized provided a perfect contrast of the life before and after the levee break started flowing.[…]

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Vanishing Eden

April 1, 2012 Jerald Horst

The smoke/glitter sparkle beetle arched through the air toward a handful of scraggly, brush sticks poking out of the water — the few remains of the live black mangroves that once covered a substantial island.[…]

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Fried Rice

March 1, 2012 Humberto Fontova

Eddie’s “paaaw-ty barge” was aptly named already, but festooned in red, white and green and filled with green-clad revelers for the Irish-Italian boat parade on the Lower Tchefuncte River — well, the USS Paaaw-ty Barge was really strutting her stuff that afternoon.[…]

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Humble Pie Specks

March 1, 2012 Jerald Horst

I am sitting in the dark in Silverfish Lodge’s boat shed waiting for my guide, Charlie Thomason, to return from an errand. Oyster boats, one after another, are chugging and puffing by in Bayou La Loutre, so close I could flip a coin onto their decks.[…]

Bass Fishing

Green-Eyed Monsters

March 1, 2012 Capt. Steve Himel

Your guns have been cleaned, your hunting gear packed away. You have caught up on some much needed rest, watched the Super Bowl, endured Mardi Gras and finished your long honey-do list that accumulated over the fall hunting and fishing seasons.[…]

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A Piece of the Rock

March 1, 2012 Jerald Horst

I was stuffed and still the food came. I wondered if Gunner Waldmann and David Bertrand were trying to kill me. First, Waldmann forced me to participate in a redfish blowout that morning. Then he hauled me to Shucks Seafood House in Abbeville, where owner Bertrand took over.[…]

Bass Fishing

Larto’s Other Fish

March 1, 2012 Jeff Bruhl

Twenty-five miles south of Jonesville, Larto Lake is tucked into some of the best backwater fishing in the state. Late winter bass action on Larto, with its oxbow shape, is a jig fisherman’s paradise.[…]

Bass Fishing

Great Expectations

March 1, 2012 Chris Ginn

On the morning of March 10, anglers with great expectations will launch on either side at Doiron’s Landing in Stephensville hoping to land a heavy enough bag of bass to make the top 20 cut to fish the second day of the Louisiana Sportsman Open Bass Championship presented by Skeeter and Yamaha.[…]