Monster Magnets
Landing a legendary fish takes more than luck
A stampede of deer is the first thing to greet guests in Captain Coon’s living room.
Dozens of them, bristling with antlers, jut from the wall around the TV with their vacant, unblinking eyes. The captain has his feet kicked up on the recliner in front of them as he watches his Major League Fishing on The Outdoor Channel. Above his chair, facing off with the deer, is the captain’s prize catch, a 228.13 lb. tarpon.
The tarpon is a prehistoric fish that still frequents the waters around Louisiana’s coastline; it’s said to have the speed and strength of a maneater. Lance Schouest has been catching these giant fish since the ‘seventies. Aboard his charter boat, he’s best known as Captain Coon, or simply as the captain. July through October, this fish is Captain Coon’s livelihood. He and his family have caught untold thousands.
Captain Coon carries a variety of tools on his boat, but it’s the Coon Pop lure—a simple piece of Cajun ingenuity—that makes the captain and his family pioneers in the charter fishing industry throughout the Gulf. In the ‘eighties, Captain Coon was experimenting with different types of lures. At the time, Papa Joe Schouest and his sons opted for the seahawk lure or the spoon lure when fishing for tarpon. The spoon lures they dragged behind their boat would get plenty of bites, but rarely an actual catch, the captain recalled. Likewise, the tarpon would just break the seahawk lures once they struck them. The Schouest men would watch their lures flying back through the air. “They’d throw it about a mile. That’s the thing about the tarpon. He’s a jumper,” said Captain Coon. “They’re so spectacular. It should be called tarpon hunting. Once you find them, then you gotta hunt them. They’re just not a easy fish to catch.”
But the Coon Pop helps. Captain Coon caught nine tarpon the first day he put the Coon Pop in the water. The lure is a simple design of the captain’s that uses PVC piping, wire, tiny ball bearings, a lead head, and a circle hook instead of a J-hook. The ball bearings inside the PVC piping produce a kind of rattling noise that attracts the tarpon, he explained. “The lure works because it gets the bite, but the hook does the real work.”
The fisherman’s hope is to snag the tarpon in the hard bone of the top part of its mouth. The battle can last thirty minutes to an hour, as the fish thrashes around trying to break free. If a lure is still attached, this creates leverage on the other side of its mouth; with enough thrashing, the fish can widen the gap around the hook in its mouth to essentially slip away. But when a tarpon latches onto Captain Coon’s signature lure, the wire connecting it to the hook snaps and the lure pops off (hence the name “Coon Pop”). “It gets rid of the leverage,” said the captain. “If the weight stays there, it will make a hole in their lip and they can get away.”
He started off making hundreds of the lures at a time. Today he still handcrafts each lure from his residence in Houma, selling the Coon Pops over the phone for $5 each. Over the years, people have made their own Coon Pop-style lures, tweaking his design and adding their own variations.
The real joy of the captain’s job is watching guests on his charter boat cast out their line and reel in the big fish. “I love bass, trout, redfish … I love all of them. But when you see one of these rollin’ around in the water, the excitement level is so much higher,” he said. “People don’t realize we have monster tarpon here.”
Decades in, Captain Coon still feels the rush himself. “Don’t call me pro. That’s someone who’s learned and mastered his game. I learn something new every year.”
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Snagged by Science
For Zachary Dubois, it’s all about applying the right tools to catch the next biggest fish.
“It’s like trying to solve a puzzle,” said the 24-year-old Kaplan native.
For your average fisherman, the puzzle begins with tying on a lure and finding a good spot on the water. But Dubois does his guesswork at home, in a mini plastics lab where he designs and crafts an array of mostly freshwater lures with names like “Cooyon Croaker,” the “Poodoo Craw,” and the “Bayou Bug.”
Dubois has created thousands of these lures over the last couple of years, selling his product via sporting goods stores in the Lafayette area and on his website (cajunlures.com). His lures are handcrafted, in a decidedly twenty-first century sense. “I explain to [other owners of fishing lure and sporting goods stores] the things they could do, and it kind of blows their minds,” said Dubois.
Each new lure he creates begins with a mental image; then he sets out with a rough sketch of the lure on paper. Once he has the basic concept, Dubois projects the sketch on a 3D modeling program on his computer.
Dubois graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (ULL) with a degree in industrial design and currently works as a computer-aided design (CAD) drafter at a marine design company. With his lures, he goes a step beyond his day job by producing the designs as models using a 3D printer he purchased last year. From there, he orders aluminum molds for each lure using the newly printed model. He then mixes paint and glitter into a pot of liquid plastic and injects the resulting goop into the molds using a pump.
As Dubois moves through this process, an app on his phone dings with the sound of new purchases from his online store. It can be hard to keep up, he said.
Each lure comes in a variety of different shapes and colors designed to meet any type of scenario: rain, shine, night, day, swamp, mud, you name it. Dubois’ particular fascination with bass fishing is partly on account of the multiple variables that come into play. “You have to learn to be more efficient on the water,” said Dubois, who wised up quickly competing in fishing tournaments with the Ragin’ Cajuns bass fishing team at ULL. “You have to dial in your skills, whether you’re using one type of bait or multiple baits to get your fish. You learn why they are biting at this time and why not at this time, why this color works and why this one doesn’t.”
For instance, when the clouds begin to roll in, an advanced angler knows the fish are going to be feeding more aggressively before hunkering down, said Dubois. Rather than packing it up and going home, the savvy fisher will attach a different lure. “If you don’t know the science behind the fish, then you aren’t going to do that well,”he added.
Dubois’ mission is to craft the kind of lure that the most avid tournament fisher will want to purchase but that even a novice can use. “It’s like an endless exploration,” said Dubois. “You’re always trying to make the perfect bait.”
[Now read: The Boat That Got Away.]
Coon Pop
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