One ultra-popular season opener is a family affair for Larry Doiron of Stephensville.

The Doirons will join many other offshore fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana’s coast when the state’s recreational harvest for red snapper gets underway April 15. Every fisherman out there can keep four red snapper, which is the largest daily creel limit in many years, that must meet the 16-inch minimum length limit.

Doiron, 53-year-old owner of Doiron’s Landing, which includes the recently renovated convenience store, said the plan is to fish for red snapper and mangrove snapper. He typically probes the depths for red snapper around old wrecks and abandoned oil industry platforms but avoids the oil rigs that attract so many boats until he decides to add mangrove snapper to the ice chest.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, the Reel Deal, his 37-foot long Freeman VH, is destined to motor out for its first offshore fishing trip of the year when April 15 rolls around.

“We haven’t been in ’24 yet. We didn’t make it out there this year,” he said, explaining the convenience store and boat landing have been busy with weekend bass tournaments, extremely so, to date.

The crew he expects to ride out with him from Doiron’s Landing includes his wife, Angela Fuller Doiron, daughters Ashley and Molly, and son, Joseph. Molly, the youngest at 16, hasn’t missed a red snapper opener since she was an infant, he has pointed out proudly in the past.

On previous trips for the first red snapper trip of the year, he has steered his boat to the Eugene Island blocks but was noncommittal about this year’s destination while noting he does plan to target 100- to 300-foot depths.

Leaving from his store’s boat ramp, he said, does make it a farther run – approximately 100 miles one way – but it’s hard to beat the convenience compared to trailering the Real Deal to the Jesse Fontenot Memorial Boat Landing, Berwick.

“With our Freeman, it’s a little easier to fish here” because of the speed and fuel range of modern boats such as the Real Deal, he said before the red snapper opener in 2021.

His favorite red snapper bait is blackfin tuna as cut bait, either freshly caught or frozen. If blackfin tuna’s unavailable, fishermen on the boat use either pogies or Spanish sardines.

The 2024 season is scheduled to be open seven days a week and will remain open until the recreational landings approach or reach the state’s annual private recreational allocation of 934,587 pounds. Past seasons included three-day weekends (four-day holiday weekends for Memorial Day. Fourth of July and Labor Day) for several years.

Doiron is happy it’s a seven-day a week season. And he also appreciate the addition of one more red snapper in the daily creel limit per person.

“I love the four-person (limit) and seven days a week works a little better with weather and we always have big tournaments on weekends,” he said, a development that makes it a little more difficult to get away. Plus, he said, Doiron’s will be a weigh station for CCA-Louisiana’s S.T.A.R. tournaments this year.

Doiron and crew are sure to be joined on the water by dozens of boats from the Teche Area, weather conditions permitting. Among those are the Megalodon, skippered by Dr. Eric Elias, a New Iberia native who lives in Lafayette, and Patoutville skipper Jacques Hebert and his Sea Mistress.

“It’s going to be fun,” Hebert said soon after the season dates and regulations were announced March 7 by the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission.

“It looks like they’re going to give us a real snapper season. Oh, yeah, I’m very happy.”

Elias, who traditionally goes out on opening day with his father, Dr. Daryl Elias Sr. of New Iberia, and his brother, Dr. Darryl Elias Jr. of Lafayette, can’t wait. After all, he said, he’s never experienced a bad year of red snapper fishing in his life.

Doiron has enjoyed beaucoup bountiful red snapper days himself since he started fishing as a youngster in the 1980s with his father, the late Larry Doiron Sr., who died in May 2022. They ventured out in those days on a Grady White.

He has learned how to fish for and boat big red snapper, those well above the 10-pound average. To catch the bigger red snapper, he uses a 13/0 Mustad circle hook, an 8-ounce weight and a very large piece of cut bait.

“The bigger the bait, the bigger the fish,” he has said, adding, “I find the deeper the water, the bigger the fish.”

He drops the baited hook to 15 feet off the bottom and works it up through the water column until locating red snapper, he said.