Reserving Time to Fish a New Area
Keith Lusher 10.29.24
It’s something that we all experience at one time or another. You decide to fish a new area. then after striking out, vow to never fish there again.
John Gibby of Mandeville, LA, experienced a bad trip to a new area but decided to give it another shot. Goose Point is a popular fishing spot located on the northern shoreline of Lake Pontchartrain. The spot is only a 5-minute boat ride from the launch and just makes sense from his point of view. “I usually fish the Hopedale/Biloxi Marsh area, and I feel extremely confident fishing there, but three hours of those trips are just sitting in the car, and that’s three hours I’m not with my kid, friends, or family,” Gibby said. 
On Gibby’s first trip to Goose Point, he didn’t manage to catch a single fish, which had him questioning why he didn’t just stick with fishing his old spot. But after a few months went by, Gibby decided to give it another try. “I watched a few YouTube videos made by folks who fished the area so I had some sort of starting point to work with. I live only a couple blocks from the lake so it would be nice to learn how to fish here, ” he said.
Gibby decided to reserve 3 days to solely focus on fishing Goose Point. “I wanted to test myself. I wanted to see if I could learn how to fish this area. People tell me there’s a lot of fish to catch in October so I gave myself 3 days to figure it out,” Gibby said.
On his first day, Gibby covered a lot of water and spotted lots of baitfish in the water. He had a few hits every time he fished in the baitfish that was breaking the surface. He ended the day with only 2 speckled trout. “I feel like I made a little progress, or at least enough to build upon. I’ve downloaded a lot of data on this trip,” he said.
On the second day, Gibby cruised the shoreline, focusing on what put fish in the boat on the previous day. He scanned the surface for baitfish and found a school of baitfish. Gibby picked up 3 speckled trout. “I was finding my groove and I started to see the potential in this area,” he said.
Then it all came together as he started catching trout by casting into the baitfish in addition to something called eel grass or Vallisneria. The eelgrass grows in long strands that can reach lengths of 6 feet.
“People say that these patches of grass are what to look for and it wasn’t until I reeled up my line and I had a strand of the eelgrass hanging on my lure that I remembered,” Gibby said. Gibby started fishing the patches of grass with baitfish and started putting trout in the boat. It was about this time that Gibby realized the power of dedicating time to fishing a certain area.
But the highlight of the day came after a long bomb cast into an area of surface turbulence in a patch of eelgrass.
It was 9:20 a.m. Gibby was using a 4-inch Z-Man Smokey Shad Swim Bait with a 16-ounce bullet weight when he felt a thump and set the hook. “That drag was pulling and after it flashed I knew that it was a gator trout,” he said. Gibby battled the fish and tried to steady the net for a landing but missed on two passes. Then the trout swam by again and he swam right into the net. Gibby was shaking and breathing heavily. “I’ve been grinding all morning and finally caught what I came here for. I knew there were big trout in here,” he said.
Gibby had landed a 20-inch speckled trout, which was just shy of his personal best. “If you would have told me that I was going to catch a 20-inch speckled trout today, I would have said that you were out of your mind. Gibby finished off the day with a few more trout to reach a total of 15 for the day. But more importantly, he had the confidence and knowledge to flip the area from “no man’s land” to his new stomping ground, and it didn’t even take him his allotted three days to do it!
