If you check the encyclopedia set inside Jake Donachricha’s Baton Rouge home, the thickest, heaviest book is marked “F.”

With good reason: “F” stands for “fishing” and this guy is a fisherman, and one who spends lots of time in the Atchafalaya Spillway.

“Catching fish there now after a long, long period of high water. The water looks good in most places, and we’re catching fish,” Donachricha said Thursday, a few hours of which he spent sorting, marking, tuning up, cleaning and making sure tackle was stored in all his just-right places. Organization is one of his strong suits and he got his tackle in order.

“Really, the Spillway is about as good as it’s going to get right now. The water is a little high for this time of year, and there’s some water in the woods, but there’s not enough of it to make a difference for the fish,” he said.

Donachricha (pronounced DON-ah-REACH-ah) said the biggest factor now and for the next couple of months will be to find moving water, because moving water is cooler water. The water remains a bit too warm in the canals for bass and most other sought-after species, especially sac-a-lait, which prefer cooler water temperatures. (The sun will have to get lower in the sky and air temperatures will have to cool more than what came in this weekend’s cool front to lower water temps for numbers of fish to move into the canals.)

“The bayous and canals (and) the canals with moving water are holding more baitfish and that’s where the bigger fish will be, too,” Donachricha said. “That’s to be expected. I’m not saying there are no fish in canals, it’s just the fish in the moving water are more active and, it looks like to me, there are more fish in the natural bayous.”

That’s only half of it: Lures are important, too, and Donachricha was quick to head to his boat and point to the baits tied on the ends of rods on the front deck.

There were six. Two of them had white spinnerbaits with bulky, white, curly-tailed trailers sticking from the back ends of the baits. One, he said, was a 40-year-old handmade bait with a head looped onto the bait’s arm. It had a handmade shiny, chrome willowleaf blade.

“It’s a Lawrence Amadee spinnerbait I’ve had since 1971. I’ve had it this long because it works,” Donachricha said.

The other spinnerbait was larger, with a single, gold willowleaf and bulkier trailer.

“I like the trailers because it gives the bait a larger profile and makes it more buoyant,” he said. “That lets me be able to reel the bait more slowly and the size matches the size of the shad in the Spillway right now. I use it around green (living) cypress trees or near the banks depending on where the shad are moving.”

The others are a Chatterbait rigged with a pearl/chartreuse H&H Cocahoe Minnow: “I like this bait in the grass and use it wherever I can throw a spinnerbait. The problem with it is that it will hang up in a second, but it can run the grass pretty well,” he said.

The next was a Pit Boss, Pure Fishing’s “creature” bait in the Havoc series, a watermelon/red glitter Donachricha modified by pushing a crochet needle through the middle of the bait, then pulling chartreuse spinnerbait skirt material back through the hole: “I fish this weightless with a screw-into-the-head keeper hook and cast it into duck seed and over grass. I put the (skirt) threads through it to give it a little more action on the surface. It works. The fish can’t stand it and eat it,” Donachricha said.

The other two were crankbaits, Strike King KVD square-billed lures, both in shad colors, one in Louisiana’s popular Tennessee shad color, he uses around downed trees: “Look, if you want to find a big (bass) right now, they’re usually isolated on structure away from the bank, like the log sticking up out into the bayou. Or find a tree that fell from the bank out into the bayou or canal,” Donachricha said. “There might be a foot of water around the truck, but there might be 6-8 feet of water around the branches, and that’s where these crankbaits work on big bass, when the baits are coming through that kind of cover.”