Departing from the strategy for the Atchafalaya Basin, the state left pre-storm regulations intact for the Lake Pontchartrain Basin area: Up to 10 bass per day may be kept, and no minimum-size limit is in force. Bates hopes that the state at least imposes a minimum-size limit.

“It’s going to take some time and some help to bring this area back to what it was,” Bates said. “What we need more than anything around here is a size limit. I’d say put on at least a 12-inch minimum limit on bass. People keep too many 8- to 10-inch bass that never spawn. Some people don’t even bother with the 10-fish daily limit -- they keep everything they catch. When they put a 14-inch size limit on bass in the Atchafalaya Basin after Hurricane Andrew, that helped a lot. It allowed a bass to at least spawn one time before someone ate it.”

By spring 2007, anglers started catching more small bass in the Tickfaw system; a few fish exhibited respectable size. Anglers must really look for the fish, which remain widely scattered in small pockets.

“It started to come back in the spring of 2007,” Bates said, “but nothing compared to what it was before the storms. People were starting to catch some big fish and better numbers of small ones. We’ve had some 5.5- and 6-pound bass caught since the storm. Before the storms, people were catching some bass over 8 pounds.”

After the storms, anglers came back more quickly than did the fish. In the summer, the rivers again churn with an armada of cruisers, pleasure boats, ski boats and personal watercraft. Several bars reachable only by boat operate along the Tickfaw River, catering to summer pleasure-seekers. The wakes thrown up by these boats pound the riverbanks mercilessly, chasing fish off the shorelines.

“Tickfaw was a good river for people who knew how to fish it,” Bates observed, “but people had to get out really early in the summer before the big boats started moving. Boat traffic on the Tickfaw River is horrible; in the summer, it’s just atrocious. We have some really big boats running the river. They throw a lot of wake that beat the shorelines. The boat wakes mess up the shorelines and scare the fish away; sometimes the fish habitat gets washed away. In the summer, people need to find some backwaters or tributaries and get off the banks to find fish.”

The problem has grown steadily worse over the past decade as ever more people have moved from New Orleans or Baton Rouge to the scenic rivers north and west of lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas. After the storms of 2005, many couldn’t return to their homes in New Orleans and surrounding parishes, and the population exploded exponentially, with people who had lost their homes relocating to “higher ground” in the Florida Parishes.

“The population of this area really grew in the past 10 years,” said Scott Mullins of Tickfaw Marina in Killian. “Subdivisions are going up everywhere, and that brings in a lot more fishermen. That puts a lot more pressure on the fish and on the river system.”

Fortunately, boat traffic greatly decreases as the weather cools from late September on. In the fall, winter and early spring, you can often fish at leisure, dropping worms and craw worm-sweetened jigs around dropoffs in the main river. After the traffic diminishes, anglers fling topwaters or spinnerbaits at the cypress stumps and knees along the shorelines. As bass attack baitfish in the fall, shad-colored crankbaits will work as well.

“I recommend hitting the upper ends of the Tickfaw or Amite river systems with jigs, worms or lizards,” said Ronnie Addison, an angler from Hammond. “As temperatures cool in the fall, fish lizards on the outside edges of cypress trees where the bottom drops off. The outside bends will be a little deeper. I throw a black, blue and purple jig with a No. 11 pork chunk on it.”