Valerie Naquin smiles as she shows off a nice speckled trout caught in The Cove area about three weeks ago while on a fishing trip with her husband, Don Naquin. They caught 22 speckled trout that day. The Naquins went to another area, Mud Point, on Dec. 2 and had a 50-fish limit in 1 1/2 hours.

They kept falling, stacking up noticeably, a sight for sore eyes.

No, not the snowflakes that blanketed the Teche Area starting in the wee hours of the morning Friday.

Those were the speckled trout being dropped repeatedly in a big ice chest a week ago Saturday by Don Naquin and his wife, Valerie, and again on Sunday morning by Naquin and his fishing buddy Mike Sinitiere. Two trips, two speckled trout limits, each in a 90-minute span.

And many area saltwater fishermen — including, to an extent, Naquin — thought the speckled trout season was kaput as of Thanksgiving. Instead, the first week or so of December will be remembered as the Speckled Trout Fishing Bonanza of 2017 more than the Great Sneaux of 2017 by the Naquins and Sinitiere.

“This time of year has just been tough. This year has just been tough. We should have been catching fish like that since October. I just think the water’s too fresh. We got a lot of rain this year,” Naquin said Thursday morning.

Still, he kept going out to one of his favorite spots around Mud Point.

“I went there before (recently) and on two trips caught three fish and one of those was a redfish swimming with the trout,” he said. 

“I’d almost given up but it’s that time of year. I live my whole life to fish in the fall. I don’t give up until it’s officially over, when the water looks like the Mississippi River and there are cold fronts every two days. Then I quit,” he said.

A week ago Saturday found him shopping and running a few errands to lend a helping hand to his wife’s side job, Desserts to Go. She bakes sugar cookies and cakes in her spare time from a full-time job at Marine Industrial Fabrication Inc.

It was foggy and chilly before midday, so fishin’ fever didn’t hit until after noon. Then he and the missus decided it was time to wet a line.

They loaded up the boat, launched at Cypremort Point Boat Landing and motored to Mud Point. They started fishing at 1 p.m.

Naquin, a 57-year-old senior apparatus technician for Cleco, where he has worked 38 years, said, “I was pleasantly surprised that the water cleared up. I said, ‘There could be some fish here because it is very pretty water, water I’ve been looking for all fall.’ ”

That was a good omen.

“We pulled up on some stumps I have marked on my GPS. We pull up and fan cast and that’s what we were doing. She caught the first seven,” he said. “When I’m fishing with my wife I net every fish, take every fish off, retie her line when it breaks. She doesn’t get to fish too often. She’s there to enjoy it.”

After so many speckled trout she put in the boat, he said, “She said, “I’ll take them off. You go ahead and fish. They’re biting too good.’ ”

They caught speckled trout after speckled trout averaging 1 to 2 pounds.

Valerie, 59, an administer with Marine Industrial, where she has worked since 2007, was fishing with a grayish cocahoe minnow-type soft plastic on a leadhead, she said, “bouncing it off the bottom, reeling it in, popping it and popping it.”

“I was surprised. I was happy they were biting real well,” she said.

He was fishing with a 3-inch soft plastic swim bait, a pearl Storm model that’s one buck at WalMart, he said.

“I tried a Tsunami,” he said, “but it didn’t catch as many as that little dude. They wanted the bait swimming s-l-o-w. It didn’t matter what bait it was. Right over the stumps.”

The bite was on. Fish piled up in the ice chest and, soon, it was time to leave.

“We got there at 1 o’clock and at 2:30 we were gone,” he said.

Naquin had so much fun he decided to go again Sunday with Sinitiere. They wanted to go early but a heavy fog changed their plans.

“We left late because of the fog. We wanted to go early to make sure we were they when they started biting. We got there at 10. At 11:30, we were gone,” he said.

Sinitiere, an accomplished bass angler who works for Coca-Cola, said, “We had a great time. We went right to ‘em. It only took a few minutes before they fired up and started biting. 

With about five fish before our limit, they slowed down. Twenty minutes later they fired up again. We got our limit and we left with six boats around us. We were alone when started. Been a few years since I caught like that. Wish I could have gone back Monday.”

And Naquin planned to be out again this month as soon as possible, hopefully, after the thaw from the freeze overnight Friday. The speckled trout fishing could be fair to good but it all depends on how much rain the system brought with it and how cold it is.

“As soon as it calms down I’m going back to check,” he said. “But when they aren’t there any more, we’ll go to Shark Bayou to catch speckled trout. It’s tough. There are a lot of stumps where we’re fishing and you’ve got to make long casts across the bayou and swim it back slow.”

He has learned the inside waters in and around Vermilion Bay for the past 35 years, starting when he went with Terry Robicheaux of New Iberia.

“He (Robicheaux) taught me how to fish around the Trash Pile. We’d fish shrimp on the bottom with a leadhead,” he said.

He expanded his fishing destination and found the hotspots over the years.

As he continued to go on his own, the bass angler in him made him want to fish strictly with artificials, so he watched and watched others who fished with soft plastics.

“There was a lot of trial and error,” he said, noting he began to pick up the patterns and techniques that put speckled trout in the boat.

“I don’t think I’ve bought shrimp in 15 years,” he said.

He enjoys catching the speckled trout on a soft plastic, like he did last weekend with the Storm swim bait.