• Fishing the Forgotten Coast


    From the fishing diary of Captain Paul X. Noël, New Orleans, LA

    You're on vacation in Gulf County with its miles of sparkling white beaches and waves of emerald green. You get the urge to go fishing, but packed your laptop instead of your fishing tackle...

    What do you do?
    It's easy. Just dial one of the phone numbers from our list of fishing charters and reserve a fishing adventure tailored to your needs. Freshwater, deep sea, bay, trolling, shark, and some excellent flats fishing are just a phone call away. Fishing tackle is provided. I made two calls and fished in two completely different ecosystems.


    Freshwater Fishing
    My first phone call sent me a short drive north of Port St. Joe to Wewahitchka, a small community surrounded by a wilderness of rivers and swamps. My guide was waiting for me at the boat ramp on the Chipola River just down river of the Dead Lakes. We motored up the Chipola, its banks entangled with massive root systems of desperate trees clinging to the earth to escape the river's current. Past cabins with boats tied to battered boat docks, past aged houseboats with catfish lines trailing in the current, all looking as if the next period of high water will sweep them away. Suddenly the Chipola opened up into a vast expanse of water filled with thousands of ancient cypress stumps worn and twisted by time and the elements.

    We spent the morning casting spinner baits to the bases of huge cypress trees for bass, rubber legged brim flies to the edge of the lily pads, and dangled worms and live crickets into long dead root systems and hollow stumps for stumpknockers, chinkapins, and goggle eyes, some of which were to be used later as bait for the giant flathead catfish that lurk in the deep holes of the Chipola.

    The sun was still above the trees as we anchored over one of the guide's secret catfish holes at a bend in the river. Live brim on large hooks tied to 60 lb line weighed down with sinkers the size of hen eggs were lowered into the tangle of logs and snags at the bottom of the catfish hole. Six rods were set out and the wait began.

    Local lore says that the catfish bite best when the hoot owls start hooting in the evening. So we waited for the owls, sipping cold colas and munching on chips, watching the rod tips to signal a catfish bite. We passed the time between catfish by shucking and eating some fresh oysters from Apalachicola Bay given to the guide by a friend travelling down the Chipola in a johnboat. Wewahitchka is a magical place to fish. Wood ducks flush from behind cypress trees, anninhinguas watch from treetops, wild hog tracks cross muddy sloughs, osprey nests on the tops of dead cypress, and a small gator sleeping on the bank give the impression that this wilderness has not changed since the Spanish explorers first trekked through it so very long ago.

    Saltwater Fishing
    My second call was to Capt. Mark Howze of Forgotten Coast Adventures. The next morning I was in a flats skiff floating in two feet of amazingly clear water in St. Joseph Bay. We were surrounded by waving beds of turtle grass with patches of white sand bottom. Sting rays and a myriad of small silver fish swam around us. What a place.

    Schools of bluefish were terrorizing the second grass flat we fished. They attacked any lure cast near them. No skill needed here. Every few minutes the blues darted by the boat like a swarm of angry hornets. They kept our rods bent and reels buzzing.

    We moved farther east and drifted over a vast expanse of grass flats. A four-foot manta ray flapped gracefully past one side of our boat as a school of Spanish mackerel swam past the other side. The mackerel were just as willing to eat a lure as the bluefish were. Spanish are fast and can really make a drag scream.

    Our next stop was a large flat sprinkled with potholes that speckled trout lurk inside to ambush their prey. We drifted from pothole to pothole missing strikes and catching specks up to 16 inches.

    At midday we decided to move to Indian Pass and try our luck there. The drive between boat ramps was short, and the boat ride from the Indian Pass boat ramp to our first speckled trout was even shorter, only about four minutes.

    We caught specks at our first stop, with the bite improving as the tide began rising over the exposed oyster bars. What amazed me was there was only one other boat in sight, we were catching speckled trout steadily, and were only a few minutes from the ramp.

    We tied on top water lures when the sky started turning pink, and the bite continued. Our last fish was just at sunset, a respectable four pound speck that was good enough to end a wonderful fishing day.

    The boat ride back was directly into a gorgeous sunset, past palm trees, past pelicans flapping in long wavy lines, and under a bald eagle on its way back to its roost on the mainland. Best five minute boat ride ever.

    -Captain Paul X. Noël is a retired fishing guide who specialized in fly-fishing for redfish in the marshes below New Orleans. He discovered the Forgotten Coast in the 1990's and visits the area about twice a year. His writing has appeared in Louisiana Sportsman and in Forbes.com.