A fly-fishing buddy -- Dennis Vidrine of Lafayette -- and I encountered such a scenario a couple summers ago. The tide was falling out of a small and very shallow coulee that we could barely reach with our flies, but the action came well away from the coulee's mouth. On the falling tide, there likely will be flounder at the mouth of a shallow coulee through a stand of roseau at the edge of a bay. On that trip with Vidrine, our flies accounted for more flounder than redfish -- not that either of us complained.

If there is one setting in which roseau do not seem to provide good action, it is when they are found in a stand along the edge of a bay where the adjacent water is comparatively deep -- or more than three feet. Granted, Vidrine and I have caught some very nice fish along such stretches of Mud Lake's shorelines southeast of Theriot, but more often than not, we've been skunked there.

Conversely, the points where those stands of canes end at the stretches of bare banks between them give up fish fairly consistently. Maybe a spoon or a spinnerbait would be more productive in the deeper water there, though when it is clear -- which is relatively typical of those spots -- I would doubt it. These days, I usually bypass those stands of deep-water canes.

Even roseau isn't infallible, but, given the right scenario, the opportunities it creates for redfishing can be second to none -- especially on the falling tide!

(Editor's Note: Pete Cooper Jr. is the author of Redfish: All You Need To Know About When, Where And How To Catch Reds and Fly Fishing The Louisiana Coast.)