Highways, Streets and Sidewalks

Some look at the marsh and see a bunch of grass and water. What do you see? Is it this?

There are Highways in the Marsh

Understanding how water moves through the marsh is everything, because without moving water one does not have a fishing trip.

Louisiana’s best anglers possess this understanding, knowing when and where tidal waters will move best.

These top-notch anglers only gained this knowledge by spending a lot of time on the water.

But now I am going to save your time and effort by sharing a simple, but powerful, concept.

How Most see the Marsh

If you only fish spots, and not the conditions, then chances are you see the rest of the marsh as places that “ain’t your spot”.

It’s all water you use to get to where the fish have always been…or not.

But if you saw the marsh like in the picture below, you’d see new opportunities to catch more fish.

How Some see the Marsh

This is how experienced anglers perceive the marsh, whether the tide is rising or falling.

Each body of water is used by marine life to travel from one area to the next and can be classified by the amount of traffic they receive:

• sidewalk
• street
• highway

A trenasse bleeding into a pond is a sidewalk, and the bayou upon which the pond sits is the street, whereas the nearby pass the bayou is situated is the highway.

Or take this doodle to get a better idea.

An Accurate Concept

This understanding of how water moves through the marsh reveals spots that are worth trying because they may yield great catches at certain times.

One Example

Every spring and fall we have a mass exodus of shrimp from the marsh.

They leave towards saltier water to procreate and, as they do, are ambushed by speckled trout and redfish.

Using this “highway” analogy, it’d be a lot easier to guess where we should begin fishing, wouldn’t it?

It would. Because we would know where they are traveling and how they will travel there.

If you’re ready for more…

This higher-level understanding of bait movement is just one thing I share inside my exclusive membership, LAFB Elite.

It’s the foundational inshore knowledge all successful anglers use to consistently catch speckled trout and redfish, all in one spot and complete with instructor support.