Finding clean, moving water key to a successful trip
It took Eric Williamson a while to find some good clean water in the southern end of the Atchafalaya Basin Sunday morning, but his perseverance paid off.
“There was a lot of black water near the launch. I traveled probably a couple of miles through black water,” said Williamson, 42, of St. Gabriel. “I finally reached a point where they had some major canals running north and south, and the water mixing from there changed the whole look of what I had been seeing.”
That clean, moving water made for a fun morning of reeling in about 45 sac-a-lait with his son Eli, 8, and Eli’s fishing buddy, Jake Richard, 7, of Prairieville.
“The water was pulling through the canals that I fished very briskly,” Williamson said. “The fish were in moving water. If you threw your cork out and it didn’t move with the current, you didn’t get a bite.”
Williamson was fishing a triple-tail micro jig about 2½- feet under a cork.
“I find the triple-tail jigs a little more productive,” he said. “Anything with a chartreuse tail is what I’ve been using.”
Williamson had the most success when he positioned his boat on the south side of a canal or point in the moving water.
“The area where we fished had a point with a couple of cypress trees breaking the current a little bit,” he said. “We had to hold the boat against the moving current the whole time.”
Once they settled in, he and the two kids enjoyed about two hours of steady sac-a-lait action.
“We had to move around until we found them, and then we just kind of sat on ‘em,” he said. “But once you found ‘em, it was nonstop.”
