Current -- also an important factor here -- is most easily determined at canal intersections. While the falling tide has proven to be best in my experience, water moving either way is much better than when it’s not moving at all. Finally, unless a gang of specks has hemmed up a concentration of prey in a confined area, they will usually be on the move. Once a hot bite cools, don’t wait for it to begin again -- try to relocate its source.

Speckled trout found in most of the oil-field canals that I have fished during autumn can be best described as skillet material, with very few sizable specimens in the mix. Most range from less than a pound to 2 pounds. Unless I was fly-fishing at the time, my steadfast enticers were either chartreuse or purple soft-plastic grubs threaded onto a 1/8-ounce jighead and suspended around 2 feet beneath a 3-inch weighted popping cork. Grungy water may demand a small shrimp sweetener be added to the jig, but that’s generally a better solution for redfish than for specks.

Some good examples of productive inshore oil fields are “the Wagonwheel,” near Venice, the Chauvin field, north of Lake Boudreaux and the Deep Lake field, on the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge.

BAY FIELDS
The second type of oil patch found along the Louisiana coast is commonly known as a “bay field.” Those are located in large bays and sounds usually near the seashore, and are typically developed similarly to inshore fields. Here, though, the best structure often consists of the field’s wells and platforms -- the production facilities and smaller manifold platforms. The best of these is usually determined by how much iron is in the water around them, and the older and more dilapidated it is, the better!

These fields are typically found in water that is much saltier than inshore fields, a factor that leads to corrosion. Although both the wells and the platforms are normally equipped with cathodic protection devices, rust is unavoidable, and some of it falls apart over time and finds its way to the bottom of the bay. Oysters flourish in many of these bays, and the combination of oysters and benthic junk creates ideal structure for attracting and holding prey.

On a day-to-day basis, specks will most often be found where the most iron is in the water, and that concentration is usually near points where small-diameter pipelines -- the “flow lines” -- from the individual wells approach a platform. Their visible parts, called “risers,” extend like fingers nearly vertically from that part of the line that lies on the bottom of the bay up through the water column and the surface to a manifold on the platform’s deck. The lines are frequently in a convoluted jumble on the bay bottom near the platform, and there they can hold the largest specks around.

A marked exception to this rule is an individual well that was drilled through a reef or in water deep enough to require a clamshell “pad” for safe drilling operations. The first of those scenarios must also be determined by prospecting. Tightlining with a quarter-ounce jighead dressed with a grub in one of the aforementioned colors is a good choice here, but since there can be as many as 100 or more wells in such a field, the odds of discovering one on a reef are rather poor.