Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Weekend in Venice, LA November 2-4, 2013

Spent three days in Venice, LA this past weekend. Had some new patterns I wanted to try on the speckled trout but the winds were so bad we could barely throw spinning rods. Plus, we could seem to find trout in any appreciable numbers. The few trout we did find didn't seem to want anything but live bait. We were fishing Yellow Cotton Bay or should I say we were fishing in a dead end canal off of the bay. It would have been really hard to fish the bay in the small boat we were in. My brother called a friend of his that was fishing in another area off of the Mississippi River. We made our way back to the launch, loaded the boat and headed for Cypress Cove Marina. We launched, ran through an area called The Jump, and into the river. We headed south down the river with nothing more on our mind than getting into a mess of speckled trout, on the previous phone call my brother's friend told him they were catching trout every catch. Apparently my brother misunderstood the directions he had been given. This was evident when he turn at full speed into a canal off of the river that had submerged concrete at its entrance. This tore the bottom of the skeg off the lower unit, bent the propeller in several places, and as we found out after we returned home, the shaft the prop is attached to was also bent. We carefully made our way out of the cut and headed upriver. Not wanting to go home defeated we decided to fish the river by Baptiste Collette. This turned out to be a good decision as we caught several redfish, drum, and some type of jack. We threw the jacks back as they aren't edible.
Somewhere along the way during our adventure, my brother managed to break the spinning rod I had custom built for him. We also lost the trolling motor, I guess with all of the pounding from running in the chop the head separated from the shaft. As we sped along in the rough water, much to our amazement the remaining part of the trolling stood on end and did a double flip off the front of the boat. As beat up as we were, all we could do at this point is laugh.
As the sun sunk below the horizon we motored our way back the the marina loaded the boat and headed for the camp. The next morning, Sunday, we decided to just pack up and head for home. Who wants to tempt fate twice.
I didn't get a chance to try the new fly patterns I had developed but there will be other times.

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