How Changing Your Retrieve Can Improve Your Catch Rate
Keith Lusher 09.10.24
I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying – with age comes wisdom. But for some anglers, it could be said – with age comes routine.
On my latest fishing trip to Four Bayou in Plaquemines Parish, LA, I was forced to change my routine. What routine? Well, it’s simply a retrieving routine that has worked for ages in this area.
Here in South Louisiana speckled trout is king! So when I leaned that I was making a trip with Nick Liebel Trace Gilmore of Belle Chasse, LA, the first thing I asked was, “Where are we fishing?” Liebel responded with, “out of Happy Jack”.
Happy Jack is just off of Hwy 23 in Belle Chasse and it is the doorway to Bay Sansbois.
The bay is known for its open-water, speckled trout fishing. Anyone who fishes Southeast Louisiana knows when you fish open water, you typically fish with a saltwater popping cork. I rigged up my pole with a cork and a Market 54 Jerk Shrimp and met Liebel at the launch at 6:00 a.m.
After heading down Rodriguez Canal and across Bay Sansbois, We arrived at the first spot at 6:30 a.m. The sun was starting to peek over the horizon and a flock of pelicans passed over us and Liebel throttled the engine back.
About 40 yards out was the structure that we were going to focus on this morning. It was a set of pilings that once served as the legs of a camp. The land was eroded from years of hurricanes, turning the strip of land into a stretch of shallow water similar to an underwater levee.
Liebel pointed at the pilings and said “We’re going work our way all around this set of pilings and see what we can get.” He threw down the trolling motor and we began to cast our cork rigs out. It took all but five minutes before Liebel’s cork shot under and he set the hook.
I was relieved to see the first fish in the boat as speckled trout can sometimes be hit or miss. After unhooking his 14-inch speck, Liebel tossed it into the ice chest and returned to fishing. That spot produced a total of five trout for us in about an hour. They were all caught under a cork with a simple popping technique – once pop every five seconds or so.
While the bite wasn’t all that fast, it was consistent, and the three of us made up our minds to grind it out until we caught a 3-man limit of 45 speckled trout that day.
As we arrived at our next spot, the pattern set up the same – circle the pilings using popping corks to put fish in the boat. This set of pilings produced 7 fish and we were well on our way to a limit.
We continued this routine until 11:00 a.m. when Liebel and I noticed Gilmore tying on a new lure. We really didn’t pay too much attention to him other than handing him a few jabs about wasting time and not catching fish. Then Gilmore cast out and started retrieving his corkless lure. It was a Matrix Shad on a 3/8-ounce jighead. He was casting it out and tight-lining it back to the boat. On his third cast he hunched over and set the hook on a 15-inch speck which he boat-flipped onto the bow. Liebel and I both looked at each other and said, “Uh oh,” as we’ve seen this happen before. “Sometimes all it takes is for somebody to switch things up and that may be how the fish want it presented,” Liebel said.
Liebel and I stubbornly continued with our popping corks catching a fish every 15 minutes while Gimore put on a clinic with his cast-and-retrieve method. After telling each other, “If he catches one more I’m switching over,” Gilmore caught another and we made the call to tie on a Matrix Shad. It didn’t take long before Liebel and I had our first fish using the tight-lining technique. From that point on, the three of us continued to put fish in the boat at a substantially faster rate.
“Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to try something different – a different lure, a different depth, today it just happened to be a different retrieve that they wanted,” Gimore said.
As the sun hovered overhead we became hyperfocused on getting to that magic number of 45 trout. All three of us were whipping our lines out and retrieving in hopes of reaching our limit. That moment came at 12:30 p.m. Fittingly, Gilmore felt a thump and hunched over to wait for another bump. “There he is,” he yelled and after a quick battle he slung number 45 into the boat. After a few high-fives and some pictures with the fish, Liebel opened up the engine and headed back to the launch.
While I’ve had experiences like this one before, it never hurts to be reminded to change up my routine every once in a while. And on this day it made all the difference as we were able to reach our goal of 45 speckled trout.
