Cocodrie

The 1^st tournament of this 2006 season for Team Notorious was June 10^th, 2006 out of Cocodrie, LA.  We headed down there on Wednesday, the 7^th, to get settled in and to make a one day Tuna trip on Thursday before the tournament.  For a quick day trip, we fared ok and caught some nice Yellow fin and Black fin Tuna and even had a 500+lb Blue Marlin flash on us.

On the other hand, catching bait on Friday was the worst that I ever saw it.  Bait was everywhere, but we couldn’t get them to bite.  Sabiki rigs, silver spoons, gold spoons, spinner lures, hooks baited with pieces of ribbonfish, trout rigs, spec rigs – we threw everything we had trying to catch the finicky blue runners.  We gave up after spending $800.00 in fuel while catching bait and doing a limited amount of pre-fishing.  The livewell held a grand total four blue runners – $200.00 a bait, WOW!  To top it off, the water was so hot back up in the creek where we keep the boat was docked that night that we woke up to 4 dead baits for tournament day.

So we started out on tournament day with no live bait.  We made a 30 mile run to a rig where some friends of mine told me that the bait was stacked up the day before.  It was, but we were only able to catch but 7 or 8 blue runners.  From that point, we knew that we were going to run to either the West Delta where we have caught some big fish before, or run back the west and fish in a little bit deeper water.  It was 8:30am after we caught our bait, so time was definitely becoming a factor.  If we went and fished the West Delta it would give us about two more hours of fishing time, as we were only about 40 miles from our spot.  If we ran back to the west it was about a 75 mile run, so we opted to fish the West Delta.  We cruised at about 55 M.P.H. and headed to our spot.  Around 4 miles from our spot we hit a horrific water change.  We had no choice but to turn the boat around and head back to the west.  Time is extremely pressing now, so we ran our Mercury powered Fountain all out to better water.

At about 11:00 a.m. we let out our 1^st live blue runner on the long flat line and it got nailed – we had a 30 plus pound fish in the boat.  The conditions at the rig we were fishing looked great – the water was about 150 feet deep and it was about two degrees cooler than the West Delta area where we had just come from.  We just grinded it out there for the rest of day.  After about 11:30 a.m. the bit went dead.  We caught a couple of fish in the lower thirties, but we could not better the one that was already in the bag.  At the dock we weighed in a 32lb 15oz Kingfish that was good for a 25^th place finish.