124 Louisiana Sportsman^ | April 2015
Full to the breamCertainly, when any of my grandchildren want to spend time
fishing with me that’s a connection I want to make.
And it’s something that makes me and them full to the
bream — chinquapins and bluegills, that is — and the lower
Atchafalaya Basin is just the place to reconnect come April.
My granddaughter Lillie bugged her dad about going fishing,
and he referred her to me with a guarantee.
“Papa knows where the fish are,” he promised.
The fact of the matter was that he left off the part about how it
all depends.
Sure, I have a couple of easy-to-get-to favorite spring Basin
spots — locations that seldom fail me and my spouse.
Additionally, when the conditions are right, redear sunfish
(aka chinquapins and shell crackers) are pretty easy to catch in
those honey holes of ours.
In fact, most small children could catch them with a Snoopy
fishing pole.
My granddaughter, who happens to be in her early 20s, isn’ta child anymore, but you couldn’t prove it by her excitement
when we made plans to make a trip to the Basin last spring.
The weather conditions had warmed up, the water tempera-
tures were finally conducive for the spawn to begin, and theconcentration of redear sunfish and bluegills over the past
several years had never been better.
While I was confident, I like to think there is more of an art to
fishing bream than that — and others do, too.
“It’s all trial and error of course,” Patterson’s Gerald Foulcard
said. “But I like to fish a blue-and-white Creme tube jig with a
little piece of grass shrimp on the hook under a cork. I’ll set the
jig at the 1 to 1 ½ foot depth and shake it.
“Occasionally, you’ll have to go a little shallower, and other
times you’ll have to go a little deeper.”
One of the tricks Foulcard uses for chinquapins is bouncing
his jig right off the bottom without a cork. He also mentioned
he’ll use a beetle spin rigged with black-and-chartreuse, blue-
and-white, black-and-pink or red plastics along the bottom.
“I also use Becky’s hair jigs,” Foulcard said. “All of these artifi-
cial baits will coax fish into biting. I’ll slow-roll the beetle spin
deep or I’ll bounce the jig off the bottom.
“Generally, when I use either of these tactics for bream its
bam, and it’s on.”
On our trip, we were going to use live bait, and
my granddaughter was game when it came to the
worms.
She got past the wiggles and sticky slime of
the invertebrates, impaling them onto the No. 6
Aberdeen hook I set her up with as she mustered up
confidence.
“I can do this,” she told herself.
Once the deed was done, she cast the rig toward
the outside edge of some submerged vegetation with
fairly decent accuracy.
And her balsa cork sank beneath the water’s sur-
face.
Her first fish of the day was nothing more than a
small bait-stealing bluegill — on my boat, I impose a
7-inch minimum length.
Her Nana tried to convince me it was a keeper, and
somehow the fish made its way into the ice chest
despite my grumblings.
Lillie quickly cast her rig right back near the grass
— confident she had lowered Papa’s bar to 6 ½
inches.
Some of the best chinquapin fishing in the lower
Atchafalaya Basin occurs near Adam’s Landing in the Shell oil-
field canals in the spillway.
Additionally, Flat Lake and Bear Bayou can be excellent,
although the bite seems to always turn on the latter part of April.“ Grandchildren are the dots that
connect the lines from generation
to generation,” according to Lois Wyse.
- Be there when water temperatures are right for the spawn
— 68 to 75 degrees. - Clear to lightly stained (think very weak coffee) water is best
for bream. - Start fishing shallow (approximately 1 to 1½ feet deep) and work
your way deeper unless you have a depth finder and can start just
above the halfway depth. - The best and preferred live bait is red-worms.
- Number 6 Aberdeen hooks are great live-bait hooks for bream. If you
find the fish are swallowing your worm and hook, go slightly larger. - Numerous corks work for bream. Just ensure sure you match bobber sizes
to the hooks and split shot weights so they sit on the water correctly. - Never pass up deadfalls, stumps, brush piles and sloughs, especially
on the backside of structure when the water is moving. - When using plastics artificial baits, bream seem to prefer red,
orange and yellow colors. - Fish the bottom for chinquapins.
- Using a jig and plastic lure that’s tipped with a piece of worm,
river shrimp or Berkley Nibbles can be a deadly combination.
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