A nice video, Mileypop. Thank you for sharing. I can't speak for the preceding commenters, but I know that I've had more than a couple hunts like this one. I shoot full choke on open water and still have those days where I shoot more than I'm comfortable admitting. It happens, particularly with those big groups of teasing grays.

Happy to hear y'all are having a good season.

If DGuidry did some sh*t-stirring to bring this issue to a head, I for one would like to thank him. The thing about sh*t-stirrers: the sh*it - in this case a really bad law with respect to how public hunting land is governed in the state - always precedes the stirrer. It would appear that this particular pile of sh*t has had a good stirring past due for some time now.

Bummer about the ticket. I got hit for the same at Big Branch, despite having been told in years past by one of the game wardens who ticketed me that waiting at the boat launch was acceptable. There are a couple things (beyond the dent in my finances) that bug me about this approach. One, they'll likely enforce it only once or twice a year. Thus, the boat launch staging likely won't change for most hunters. For those who were cited and consequently choose to follow the law, their chances of ever getting a decent hole out there are even more unlikely than they already were. Two, where the hell are we supposed to stage? Public hunting only works well when there is a merit system ('first come, first serve') in place. We need a place, presumably off the refuge, to get in line. Until they find one and make it official, the gws are opening the door to all sorts of shenanigans, many of them likely dangerous (imagine the racing to the launch). It's not enough to destroy the old system. They need to replace it.

I figured as much.

Thank you both for the insights.

Mediocre: had some fantastic hunts, lots of mediocre ones, and couple of stinkers (though, miraculously, I didn't get skunked once). I shot right around fifty ducks and hunted 16 times. So my avg. was just over three. I hunted Big Branch and Sherburne and made one hunt in Texas. My bread-and-butter duck was, as is typical, the gray duck, making up over half of the ducks I shot. The rest were pretty much evenly distributed among mallards, greenwings, and woodies. (Oh, and a couple redheads, a couple spoonies, a couple ringnecks, and one ruddy.)

I think Boots hit the nail on the head. I have a theory about these sorts of things: game that is easy to kill or catch with basic, non-specialized gear used to be seen as inferior on sporting (and probably class) grounds. 'It's easy to shoot a coot/catch a gou. Try shooting a pintail/catching a trophy bass.' Over time, we forget the initial reason - or more likely, repress it, deliberately forget it - and supplant it with a more reasonable one: 'Coots and gou don't taste good.'

I came to Louisiana from Texas and brought with me a lot of culinary prejudices: choupique (which we called grennel): hell no. Black drum: only if you're hurting/have an empty freezer. Coot: no way. Spoonies and ringnecks: give them to your unsuspecting neighbor who knows nothing about ducks. What's the common denominator among all the foregoing? It's not that they taste bad - though, to be fair, I'm still quick to skin my ringnecks instead of plucking them. In fact, lots of these are quite tasty, delicacies even, for some people. Rather, what they all share is a particularly sorry survival instinct, making them easy to get in the pot.

Class, I'll note as an afterthought, is also significant. In Texas, if you can get to it with a canepole, then it's disparaged my many 'sportsmen' as unworthy/untasty. That's one of the really cool things about Louisiana: its culinary traditions, many of them the consequence of entrenched poverty generations back, have climbed into the mainstream. The rich come from all over the world to eat cuisine that was forged out of poverty.

The kill of a lifetime, right there. Congratulations. I generally resist the urge to call up the taxidermists (the money that goes to him keeps me out of the field for a couple hunts), but with a singular bird like that, I'd cave in a hurry. Congratulations again.

Wow - whatever controversy you're referring to must have been really eating you up this past year.

I hope you're satisfied with your retort. You had a year, after all, to polish it.

I grew up fishing Sabine from the Texas side. My dad and brothers still fish there quite a bit, particularly at the jetty and Blue Buck Point. There are some big trout in there, and some even bigger flounder. Glad to hear y'all are doing well.

It's probably a bonnethead, a smaller, though clearly related species of shark common to the surf. (I caught one in a castnet once as a kid in the first trough.)

I'm more interested in the blue cats. You caught them in the surf? You sure they're not gaftops?

Well it sounds like the Texas outfit raises far more money. It sure seems like it would, housing as it does three times the fishing fleet of Louisiana. (Hence, the better prizes in the STAR, more quality research, etc.) Should we not respect proportionality here? Only when Louisiana stands to benefit.

I think you were doing better when you were sticking to the oyster-dredging debacle. Now you just sound indiscriminate in your scorn, which suggests to this reader that motorboat might be right, i.e. that you've been denied a contract or grant money or something.

I find it hard to believe that Texas receives more fishing pressure than Louisiana. I'm generally sympathetic to your argument and find your reasoning compelling, Mathgeek, but having fished both the Texas and Louisiana coast, my experience (which is by definition limited and strictly observational) is that there are far more boats in the water, more bank fishermen, more commercial fishing, etc. in Louisiana than in Texas. Does the data suggest otherwise, or are you just assuming that since Texas has a larger coastline there must be more pressure?

A semi-related question: why does Texas (and Florida) consistently produce larger trout than Louisiana? If it's not for the restrictions on creel limits, then what is it? Nutritional? Genetic? We've had this discussion before on this site, and I've heard a number of theories, very few of which are the least bit convincing.

This is what argumentative discourse is supposed to look like. DU-haters take note. (Protip: you'd score more points on this site if you could somehow make Obama complicit in CCA policies. For our purposes, Landrieu would suffice.)

On a more serious note, would boycotting CCA perhaps cause more harm than good? Wouldn't it be more reasonable and pragmatic to pressure them to shift their position? They are, after all, funded and, for the most part, constituted by anglers, sportsmen, and conservationists (i.e. by us). My worry is that to incapacitate them might push us even further down that proverbial creek. We've already seen that Jindal's commitment to coastal restoration (which, btw, I agree should be paramount in our concerns, way beyond creel limits)is downright laughable. Who's to say his progeny won't likewise rob our coffers?

My point, in short, is that CCA might be doing its job poorly, but if we fire them, as it were, we might be left with no one. Which is to say: we're probably better off with incompetent voices than no voices at all.

No bridge; you have to drive north a few miles until you find another road the crosses the levee. The name of the road escapes me at the moment. You can see it with a map.

Snuck out there late morning today. Had a sack in a few hours running about fifteen nets. Used both melt and catfish remains. Catfish spines surprisingly outfished the melt.

Others did really well. Saw a couple of parties with multiple sacks. They were presumably fishing all the way in the back. We fished the front compartment.

Be careful. The snakes are out in force.

Hogs will certainly make finding them more difficult, but I'm hoping to find an area where they're plentiful enough to sustain both me and the swine. And in any case, fungi grows fast. Unless the pigs have set up shop on the picking grounds, I think I've got decent odds.

I was wondering the same thing myself. This time last year, the crawfishing at South Farms was happening. I thought about going this past weekend, but decided to hold off for another weekend or two. I'm thinking the cold winter will have everything a month or so behind schedule. But I am, in this case, eager to be proven wrong.

Where they at, GuyInTheWhiteBoots?

These are the kind of lotteries I can get behind!

If we eliminate hunting over feed, that still won't eliminate the feed itself. So, we're left with a dilemma: either we allow hunting over cut feed, and thereby apply pressure on the birds, or we give the ducks carte blanche to loaf around and gorge themselves. In short, making it illegal to hunt over harvested ag fields will not stop solve the problem, if in fact a problem exists. At best, it will make it worse.

I think all of us agree but the original poster, jjoojj.