There’s a cold front moving in and I’m smoking some chili pequin peppers while drinking a Lone Star Light on the back patio.
Life is good.
But not nearly as good as it was a few weeks ago. That’s when a group of friends and I got to spend a couple of days fishing Venice, LA, which is considered by many to be the Mecca for red fishing. The trip was to celebrate my boy, Colton’s, bachelor party by marking off a bucket list fishing location.
As with any guys trip, there’s a story or two to tell. We were booked to fish with our guide Chris, of CW Guide Service in Venice, for a Thursday and Friday morning. I was lucky to have been granted the Thursday and Friday off, since I just started a new job, so I couldn’t cut out of work early to make the road trip with Colton and Reed. Instead, I caught an afterwork flight to NOLA, where the guys could pick me up on their way through to Venice.
My flight was planned out perfectly. Just long enough to order a beer on the short hop to Houston Hobby, where I had an hour and a half layover and could grab a bite and brew to get the weekend started early. Or so I thought. Moments after we pushed back from the gate in San Antonio, we were told by the captain that weather caused a backup in Houston and we’d have to sit on the runway for 45 minutes. Once we got in the air, in flight service was cancelled.
Made it to Hobby with about 20 minutes between flights instead of 90, so no food or beer there, and the in flight service was cancelled on the ride to NOLA as well. Luckily I made it to NOLA right on time. Or so I thought. When I called the guys to tell them I arrived, they said I’d better go find a bar because they were still 2 hours out. Apparently it was raining pretty bad along the IH10 corridor. Oh and Reed was late getting to Colton’s to head out, which we should have anticipated (that’s kind of his thing).
So I people watched in the NOLA airport baggage claim area for a couple hours and waited for the guys. By the time they got me, it was past 11pm and we still had about 2 hours on the road to Venice marina, with a 5 a.m. wakeup in our future. We made it to the marina around 1 a.m. and found our house boat where Colton’s dad (Roy), the final member of our trip, had already claimed his bed.
None of us were ready to sleep (too pumped about fishing), so we sat on the back patio and drank beer. The little patio thing we were sitting on was technically also a boat dock, where our guide would pick us up later that morning. It wasn’t long before Roy came out to join the trash talking, announcing that he’d just made a pot of coffee (at 2 a.m.), which got a laugh out of us. We finally decided to crash and catch a short nap around 3.
Our guide picked us up on the back patio just after sunrise and we headed out toward the marsh. I mean I guess it was technically marshland. There basically a bunch of water channels, which kind of looked like a road system, split up by tall reeds, cane, and grass.
The cool thing about the trip out to our fishing spots, and Venice in general, is that it’s basically right on the Mississippi River. There are parts of the river deep enough that the water stays cold year round. That results in fog due to cold pockets of air right above the water. Now when you’re in a boat going 40 mph and all of a sudden you’re in the middle of one of those cold pockets, you experience a sudden drop in temperature that helps waken your body up from the short night’s sleep prior.
Chris had on us fish within 15 minutes of our trip out to the spots and it was game on from the moment of the first bite. Colton landed the first red fish of the trip, appropriately so, and we were off to the races. We didn’t catch a single trout, which Chris said was likely due to the unseasonably warm and unpredicatable weather, but we reeled in tons of reds and sheepshead.
We fished for every bit of 4 hours, drank a few beers, told stories, and talked a lot of trash about who had the biggest fish or who caught the most. All the while, we could barely keep our hooks baited because they were biting so fast. We joked about how it wasn’t actually fishing, it was just catching.
We made it back to the marina with 25 redfish and a dozen or more sheepshead, with a total wait of 170 pounds before cleaning. We had all the fish cleaned, filet’d, and air sealed because what’s the point of paying for a guided trip if you have to do the messiest job yourself?
I think it was Colton, or maybe Roy, that had the best idea of the day, which was to take some of the fresh sheepshead to the marina restaurant and have them fry it up for us with some sides. Talk about a good pre-nap meal right before a hard rain rolled in to beat on the tin roof of the house boat and help us sleep. We needed to catch up on our rest before the next day of fishing for bull reds.
