Young angler lands rare inland catch

Published 7:24 am Sunday, November 13, 2016

It didn’t take Mike Soileau long to see that daughter Mattie had hooked a big fish.

“I couldn’t tell what it was, but it was taking line at a good clip,” he said.

By the time Mattie could turn the fish, almost all of the 30-pound test line wrapped around the Ambassadeur 5500 reel had been stripped.

“It just about made it clear across the channel,” Soileau said.

He and Mattie were fishing that strip along the Calcasieu ship channel that runs from point on the east side just north of the Interstate 210 bridge up to the two casinos that border the river.

“It was a good thing she was using the big rod and reel, because if she had been using one that she usually prefers, the fish would have been long gone.”

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As it was, it took the eighth-grader 30 minutes to bring the fish alongside to a net.

“It never surfaced and I really couldn’t tell what it was until we got it in the boat,” Soileau said.

What it was a 19-pound Jack Cravelle or Cravelle Jack, whichever you prefer. It hit a live (and fairly large) shad on a Carolina rig.

Thirty miles up channel from the Gulf of Mexico, a fish that is more at home in the Gulf was caught right off the casino beach.

“That’s a first for us,” Soileau said, in regards to catching such a Gulf-oriented fish this far away from the big water.

“The salinity of the water up here has been good, though” he added. “Today it was a little over the normal 12 and the water temperature was about 75 degrees.”

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Information on the Jack Cravelle has it that the fish will adapt to a wide range of waters, water with salinity from 0 to 49 percent, and they will follow schools of bait fish.

In fact, in the late summer months the fish is known to follow schools of mullet into New Orleans’ Lake Ponchartrain and fishermen have a field day with them.

So, it’s not an unusual happening.

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Don Scott, one of the most knowledgeable fisherman on area waters (salt or fresh), said this type of catch was the first he had heard of in the Prien Lake area.

“You do see some crazy things out there though,” he said, adding that not long ago he caught a Spanish mackerel (another Gulf fish) right across from the Golden Nugget.

“About five years ago me and Jim Morris were fishing West Cove under the birds. I threw a topwater bait and caught about a 4-pound trout. I had the drag set tight and the fish ran towards the back of the boat. The fish went airborne and when it did a 35- to 40-pound bull shark hit it and ate it along with my $8 lure.

“The shark then ran right back at the boat skimming the side and we fired up and got out of there.”

Scott said he has also seen 5- to 6-pound triple tails around crab traps in the lower end of Big Lake.

And, Louis Vallee, the director of the area’s annual Southwest Louisiana Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, said, “it been so hot and dry that it’s allowing these Gulf fish to come up following the salt water.

“I’ve seen small sharks underneath the I-210 bridge, but that’s a big one (the Jack Cravelle) to be up here. I know that in the old days they used to catch tarpon in Big Lake and even in Lake Charles, but that was a long, long time ago.”

There are probably other stories out there of local catches of Gulf-oriented fish, but until another comes along, Mattie Soileau has the only documented catch of a Jack Cravelle in our inland waters.