Captain Dan is a genuine Cajun and something of a self taught renaissance man. He told me that he never went to college but reads a lot. He built his own house, built his own boat – a welded aluminum flats boat with many custom features, developed his own web site and ties all of his own flies.

When I called Captain Dan a couple of months ago to talk about the fishing there, he said “we won’t be fishin for em Mark, we’ll be huntin em”. That sounded pretty good to me so we set a date to go. Dan is the only flyfishing guide working out of Houma (pronounced Home-a ), a little town about 60 miles southwest of New Orleans. I met Dan at the Big Wheel Truck stop and Casino at 7:00 am and headed for the dock. We went fishing in the bayou’s south of Louisiana leading out to the Gulf of Mexico. This is an amazing place, miles and miles of grassy wetlands with a maze of channels running through the grassy areas. I was told that Louisiana has more wetlands than all the rest of the States combined, I don’t know if that’s true, but it sure looked like it to me. These wetlands are rich with wildlife with all kinds of birds, fish and reptiles (alligators). The highlight for me was seeing a couple of huge porpoises swimming in the gulf.

This is how this kind of fishing is done: You motor out to a likely looking spot, shut down the engine and Dan climbs up to the platform and starts poling and looking for fish. All of the water we fished was less than 3 feet deep. The Drum are easy to spot, their tails are sticking out of the water. The redfish were much more difficult to see, you look for a ghostly outline under the water.

We motored out for quite a few miles before we started fishing. Dan handed me a 9 weight rod with a fly that looked suspiciously like a spoon. In the first 5 minutes of fishing we spotted a pair of Redfish feeding and I hooked a heavy redfish on the first cast. Unfortunately he threw the hook and I lost him. At this point I was thinking that this was going to be easy. Find em and catch em - one after another, easy huntin.

I found that it isn’t all that easy. For one thing, I am pretty good at spotting rising fish, but I was pretty much worthless as a submerged redfish spotter. Even when Dan was pointing out the fish and screaming “can you see him, he’s right there can you see him?”, most of the time I couldn’t see anything. This was a major problem because a redfish will not move very far for a fly, you have to put it right under his nose. You have to be able to see the fish well enough to tell which end has the mouth and which direction the fish is moving, then lead him just right so the fly is right in the feeding zone at the right time. Despite my limitations, I had caught a drum and hooked 5 other fish that I lost by late afternoon. I considered this a pretty successful day, I still wanted to land a Redfish, but the scenery and wildlife were so spectacular that I would have been pretty happy even if I hadn’t caught anything.

Dan knew that I would like to catch a Redfish before I went home, and I was getting a little better at seeing them by this time, so we stayed on the water longer than planned and changed to a strange looking fly that Dan had just invented that had a rubber leg collar. We saw a large drum feeding and I cast to him, he didn’t take but the unseen Redfish next to him did. This fish wasn’t as big as some we had seen that day, but he put up a good fight and I landed him. As it turned out this little bit of luck came just in time, a storm came in and we had to race it back to shore. The fishing trip was over.

Overall, this is one of the best vacations I’ve ever had. I am something of a fishing fanatic, but even without the fishing, Louisiana is one great place to visit. The beignets and café au lait at the Café Du Monde alone were almost worth the trip. My only regret is that we were unable to find anyplace that had a zydeco band. I guess we’ll save that for the next trip.