...and that River made our fishing awesome!

Because the River possesses such land-building capabilities, Louisiana has a seemingly endless acreage of marsh and swamp.

She possesses the Gulf Coast’s longest tidal shoreline, even longer than that of Florida or Texas. This means there are literally tens of thousands of trenasses, bayous, creeks, ponds, lakes, lagoons, bays and sounds for fish to inhabit and thrive in.

All these areas are not the same. They are radically different from one another and this is due to not just the Mississippi River but also other freshwater rivers. These rivers dump freshwater into areas that eventually mix with saltwater. As a result, one end of the estuary can be completely fresh and the other end can be completely salty.

This freshwater also contains nutrients and other things that the food chain stacks on top of. As a result we have more aquatic grass, more bait and ultimately more fish. This allows for a diversity in marine life not found in such an abundance anywhere else along the Gulf Coast and eastern seaboard.

It may surprise you to learn that in most coastal parishes you can catch a largemouth bass and a yellowfin tuna all in the same day and from the same boat launch.

Having a huge estuary with freshwater input has resulted in Louisiana bearing a fruitful fishery unlike no other. Louisiana boasts the nation’s greatest creel limits on inshore species. I’ll use speckled trout as an example.

In Virginia, you can catch and keep four speckled trout per person each day. In Florida, a state renown for its inshore fishing, the limit is 4-6 per person each day depending on what zone you are in. In Louisiana, that creel limit is 25 per person each day.

Yes, as a guide I’d take clients out to catch 100+ speckled trout in a single day. On those days, we only saw a couple other boats from miles away, if we saw any at all.

But it’s not just speckled trout we fish for. We also fish for other species to include largemouth bass, redfish, channel mullet, spanish mackerel, flounder, sheepshead and more.

I think that by now you get the point. It is important to understand what it is that makes Louisiana special.

Everything else in this course ultimately ties in to this basic understanding.

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