Tagging fish
 

I had a booking that got messed up so I decided to take the bay boat and go to Venice marina to see if anybody was looking for a trip. If not I was going scouting. Lou (Rock) was working on his boat but could not get the parts on the weekend. After a breakfast at Venice marina we decided to go out scouting together. Another guide wanted to do some tagging so he jumped on also.

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Our morning went uneventful. There was not much water movement. We went through some thin cuts and into some back ponds. As I was trolling through one of these cuts I noticed a good sized tail just beyond the entrance to the pond. I put the power pole down in the cut and we worked the entrance of the pond without going into it. This paid off because I soon had our first fish of the day. After working up and tagging the fish we took a picture and released it.

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This was not the size fish we were expecting. Although the water got stirred up a bit the mullet were still moving in that area and it was not long before Rock hooks up.

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The fish ran back into the pond and around the corner to the right. I was getting ready to chase it but Rock was able to keep enough pressure on the fish for it to turn and come back in front of the entrance so he could fight it to the boat. This one also has the beautiful colors of the one I landed.

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The water was getting stirred up by this action but the mullet were still moving in the area so we played it a bit more. As I was contemplating another move I hook up to another hog. This fish is bland colored compared to the first 2 fish.

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After this guy the mullet left and the muddy water was thick so we moved on. Way back in this pond Rock hooks up to a monster gar fish 4 feet or better. The fight lasted for a while but the gar won.

We left this area and went a few miles away to some other back ponds. We bounced around there and landed our biggest of the day.

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I think by the time we finished the day we tagged 7 of these guys.

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We decided to bring in some puppy drum for food and also added one redfish to our cooler. Overall a good ending to a day that started out with no direction. When things don't look right --- Go Fishing.

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Life is Good!
Fishing is not a matter of life or death. It's more important than that.

CAPT HOOP -- OUR FREEDOM

Nice HOOP, what were the taggings for?

The state of Louisiana has a tagging program that anyone can participate in.

www.taglouisiana.com

Blue chip got it right

Good to read that you tag fish, to help the study. Thus far, I've tagged 1,400+ with 30+ of these being caught a 2nd time. It is interesting to learn how much they have grown and how far they have moved.

Glad you had a good day.

Great post - Capt. Hoop......thanks for sharing.
I release most of my fish - what do I do if I catch one
that is tagged?....is all the info readable w/o removing the
tag?

Yes call number on tag and copy number. They send you a goody bag,with info on the fishes date he was caught and size when was first caught.

Great work. That's some toads for being way back in ponds.

That is what shocked us. Never expected to find hogs like that way up in the back.

If you plan on releasing a tagged fish try to get the information off the tag and call it in. Be sure to measure it and get the lat. long. This will allow them to see the growth and how they traveled. If the fish was tagged a long time ago you may have to take the time to scrape the tag in order to read it.

Fished ECBB (Burns Pt.) today 7:30 to 12:00, keeping 4 smallish red fish, 1 bass & 1 huge flounder & 1 huge goo. Tagged about that many. Bass was full of eggs but not the red fish. Only found one small area of somewhat clean water. Surprised we caught as many as we did. The reds were almost white, from being in the dirty water

Not sure if anyone knew this, but I ran across this the other day when I was looking to purchase the XM Weather for my Garmin Chartplotter.

When you purchase this feature for your chartplotter it comes with fishing predictions which displays information on your chartplotter where they think the best place to fish will be on any given day. After further research on this data it appears that state wildife biologists (such as the CCA) sells the data that they collect from our tagging to this company. The company then adds this to the lunar data and a computer can then spit out an even better predictions on the fishing hot spots based on where we have caught fish.

A very good piece of gear to have IMO, but a little pricey. I do plan on getting the XM weather this summer, not for the predication but for the invaluble weather data and alerts that it provides.

Just figured I would pass that info along to everyone.

Good luck on the water and hope to see everyone out there.