I like to do a little fun fishing during the offseason, and I recently returned from one of my favorite places in the world — Venice, La. I’ve been going there since I was a teenager, and I can tell you from a lot of personal experience, it’s like nothing else.
Venice is the last populated port on the Mississippi River Delta, and they call it “The End of the World” because that’s where the road ends. There’s not much to do down there unless you’re fishing, hunting, shrimping, oystering or working in the oil field.
Venice is a place where, in one day, you can literally catch largemouth bass, blue catfish, bluefin tuna, yellowfin tuna, marlin, mako sharks, wahoo, redfish, red snapper and flounder. You might make a flip into some cane and catch a 4-pound largemouth bass, flip back in there and catch a bull red.
The first week of October, I made kind of an impromptu trip down to Venice and took advantage of the red snapper bite before the season ended. Caleb Sumrall, my roommate on the Elite Series, had gone down there and found some snapper pretty close to one of the passes. When we heard through the grapevine the recreation season would be shutting down soon (based on catch quota) we put together a trip.
It was me, Caleb, our fellow Elite pro Logan Latuso and Chris Alexander, the road manager for Whiskey Meyers. We went down there and smashed ‘em.
Every morning, we’d go straight out and get our four limits of red snapper, with fish weighing from 4 to 14 pounds. When you catch snapper in that 8- to 14-pound range near the passes, those are big ones for that area.
We were catching these fish in 180 feet of water, and when you catch them in that depth with 10-ounce jigs, it’s fun.
We were on a meat run, so after we caught our snapper, we’d come back in and basically junk fish. We’d catch flounder, redfish, speckled trout, black drum and largemouth bass and then cruise back in. We’d clean the fish we kept and get ready to do it again the next day.
One of the best parts of the trip was the dinners. We cooked some at the lodge, and we also brought filets to a local restaurant where we had blackened, fried and grilled fish.
I love fishing out of Venice, and I’m going to make a couple more trips later this year. I didn’t seriously bass fish during this most recent trip, but I saw some Roseau cane that needs to be flipped. So I’m planning to return in a couple of weeks.
After we wrapped up our recent trip, we stopped on the way back and got a bunch of jumbo shrimp. Since I’ve been home, we’ve been eating shrimp and fish for several nights.
Now that we’ve had several good meals, I have a bunch of fish and shrimp in the freezer. It’s going to be good for a while.
