The state just handed you a fifth red snapper for the holiday. Last week we told you the tide was building toward the full moon. It delivered, the trout stacked up on it, and now we're on the back side of it, the current going soft right as the Fourth of July traffic hits the ramps. Offshore it's flat every day through Sunday, the tropics are quiet, and LDWF bumped the snapper limit to five fish a person Thursday through the fifth. Inshore it's a timing game now, not a current game. Different week than last, same easy answer: pick a day and go. Here's how to fish the FourthInshore and marsh

Redfish. The everyday summer pattern has taken over. With the water low and clean in the ponds and the mornings dead calm, this is topwater season over the grass. Walk a plug across the pond edges, points, and drains at first light and let a red blow up on it before the heat and the afternoon storms build. The catch this week is the tide. We're off the back of the full moon, so the daily range is collapsing into the weekend and the falling-tide drain that turns the bite on goes soft. Fish the bigger of the day's moves, the midday high draining through the afternoon, and get on the water early. When the blowup quits, slow down with a soft plastic or bait under a cork along the same edges. Slot's 18 to 27, four per person, anything over 27 goes back. On a for-hire trip the captain and crew can't keep any, so the box is yours.

Speckled trout. The best inshore story this week. Capt. Jon Carter at Reel Shot Guide Service in Venice ran trout hard through the end of June: a "quick 45 by 7:30" morning box on June 30, and a June 27 run he called an "absolute beat down." The pattern's a summer classic: live shrimp under a popping cork or soft plastics along the pass points and grassy shorelines, worked early before the wind and heat come up. Same tide caveat as the reds. Limit's 15, slot 13 to 20, no more than two over 20.

Sheepshead. Around the marsh-edge rocks, pilings, and pass structure on a fiddler crab or fresh shrimp, but summer isn't their season the way the cool months are. Treat them as a bonus if you bump a school tight to a piling, not a target. No size or bag limit inshore in Louisiana, keep what you'll eat.

Flounder and black drum. Both are in the marsh mix as bonus fish on a redfish trip, though no captain put a fresh number on them this week. Flounder on the sandy drop-offs and points, drum on the bottom near marsh-edge structure. Flounder run 10 a day with no size limit; black drum are a 16-to-27 slot, five per person, one over 27.

Tripletail. The sleeper of the holiday weekend, because the pattern needs flat water and we've got it all weekend. The fish hang under crab-trap floats, weed lines, and debris in the passes, and when the Gulf is glass you idle the floats and sight-cast them with a live shrimp or a jig. It's the fish most first-time Venice anglers don't know to throw at, and glass conditions like this don't come around often. In season now, 18-inch minimum, five per person.

Mangrove snapper. With the nearshore water hot and the seas flat, the close rocks and rigs are in reach any day this week, and the mangrove bite is a reliable July producer right next to a snapper trip. Year-round, 10 per day within the 10-fish snapper aggregate, 12-inch minimum.

Red snapper. This is the week's headline, and the state made it one. LDWF Secretary Tyler Bosworth signed an emergency declaration bumping the recreational limit from four fish to five per person, per day, from Thursday July 2 through Sunday July 5, back to four on Monday the sixth, as a nod to the country's 250th birthday. It lands on the exact weekend the seas are running a foot or less and the reefs are reachable every single day. State and private recreational are both open, the minimum stays 16 inches, and the federal for-hire season runs through October 26. There's plenty of room left in the season, too (more in From the Dock). Carry a descending device. It's federally required on any reef trip, and on a good bite you'll use it on every short fish.

Yellowfin. The weather is exactly what the tuna fleet wants for the holiday, seas a foot or less, light wind, no tropics. It's peak summer out at the floaters and the lumps, and access is as wide open as it gets. We don't have a fresh dock number this week. The boats fished the calm, but the weekend's reports hadn't posted by send time. If yellowfin's what's bringing you to Venice, the conditions are on your side. Three per person, 27-inch curved fork length minimum.

Mahi and wahoo. Pattern fish this week rather than reported ones. A flat-calm stretch puts every weed line, rip, and floater in play, and the mahi have been the bright spot offshore for a couple of months now. Keep a couple of lines in the spread on the troll out to the reef or the tuna grounds and you'll have a shot at both.

Swordfish. If the daytime sword drift off the shelf edge has been on your list, this is the week for it. It's a flat-water game, and the water's dead flat every day. There's real interest in it right now; more than one boat's been asking about the run down the passes to the deep water near the Midnight Lump. A long, specialized day, but the conditions don't get more cooperative than this.

Amberjack. Still closed in federal waters through August 31, reopens September 1. That's a fall trip.

Gag grouper. Also a fall note, same reef trips as the snapper: state waters open September 1 to 30, federal September 1 to October 1. Nothing to do about it now beyond filing it for a fall reef day.

Billfish. Quiet on the water and between events on the calendar. The next billfish date on the board is the New Orleans Invitational out of Cypress Cove in August, with the Faux Pas Lodge Invitational at the Venice Marina the last weekend of July ahead of it.

Last week's setup paid off. The spring tide we told you was building toward the June 29 full moon did what it was supposed to. The trout stacked up on the moving water, and the boats that got out early on it did fine. Now we're on the other side of the moon, and the whole shape of the week flips. The daily tide range is collapsing, from about a foot on Thursday down to a couple of inches of swing by Monday, so the hard-draining falling tide that lit up the marsh last week is going soft right through the holiday. That doesn't kill the bite; it just makes it a timing game.

The Fourth itself sets up easy on the water and busy at the dock. Seas are a foot or less every day through Sunday, the tropics are dead quiet, and the state gave the offshore crowd a fifth red snapper for the long weekend. The ramps and the marina will be a zoo, so get there early for that reason too. And a warm-water heads-up: as the passes and marsh heat up, the sharks move in on your stringer. It's a July tax on an inshore box, and the fix the old-timers swear by is simple: quit dragging a stringer and put your fish in a bag in the boat. More on that below.

Reel Shot Guide Service, Capt. Brandon Carter. When the trout are the inshore story, book the boat that's been on them. Reel Shot is a Venice inshore operation working speckled trout and redfish through the marsh and the passes. By their own account, Brandon Carter's run it eighteen years, and his crew put the freshest fish on the dock this week: Capt. Jon had trout trips right through the end of June, a fast morning box on the thirtieth and a June 27 day split with a buddy boat, one crew on trout, the other offshore for snapper. That trout-and-snapper combo is the move for a July 4 group: put the kids on a cooler full of trout in the marsh and send the rest of the crew out for the five-fish snapper weekend. Book direct at reelshotfishing.com.

An insulated fish bag: swap it for your stringer before the Fourth. This one comes straight off the docks. The summer horror story is always the same: a good trout day cut short when a shark bites through the stringer and takes the whole load with it. The old-timers' fix is blunt: fish bags, not stringers. A soft-sided insulated kill bag solves both halves of the July problem at once: your catch rides in the boat where a shark can't tax it, and it stays cold in the heat, which matters when the water's pushing 90 and you're filleting trout that have been out since sunup. A 40-to-50-inch bag handles a limit of trout or reds with room to spare. Engel, Buffalo Gear, and AFTCO all make good ones, stocked at Bass Pro, West Marine, and Tackle Warehouse. Rinse it, dry it open, and it'll last you years.

The marine forecast is the easy part again. The offshore zones are running light and variable, winds around 5 to 10 knots swinging from the east early in the week to the south and southwest by the weekend, with seas a foot or less and holding there through Sunday. That's flat, and offshore is open every day Thursday through the Fourth. The one thing to watch is summer convection: scattered morning thunderstorms are in the picture most days, Thursday especially, so get out early, keep an eye on the sky, and don't be the tallest thing on the water when a cell builds.

On the moon and tide, we've flipped off last week's spring tide. We're a waning gibbous now, dropping toward the last quarter over the holiday, so the tide range collapses through the weekend. At Pilottown the daily high slides from about 1.17 feet Thursday to 1.01 by Saturday and under a foot by Sunday, one cycle a day, a midday high draining through the afternoon into a late-night low. Weak current by the weekend, so fish the front of that falling tide and don't expect the hard drain we had last week.

Water temperature's deep into its summer plateau. The Southwest Pass buoy's been reading right around 90 this week, and that sensor runs a touch hot, so call it upper 80s to low 90s at the surface. That’s bathwater, the reason the sharks are thick and the reason you want that fish bag on ice. The Mississippi at the Venice gauge is sitting low, running under two feet and about steady day over day. The gauge is tidal and swings through the day, so read the state of it, not any single number, and the state of it is low and clean, exactly what the marsh ponds want. The tropics are quiet: the National Hurricane Center expects no development anywhere in the Atlantic or Gulf over the next seven days. Nothing to act on, though we're into the stretch of summer where that's worth checking before a big offshore day.

Five red snapper for the Fourth. LDWF's emergency declaration raises the recreational limit to five fish per person, per day, Thursday July 2 through Sunday July 5, then back to four on the sixth, the 16-inch minimum unchanged. If you were already planning a reef trip this weekend, that's a free fish per person. If you weren't, it's a good reason to book one.

The snapper season's got room to run. Worried the state season's about to slam shut behind that extra fish? It isn't. LDWF's latest estimate has Louisiana anglers at 266,420 pounds landed, about 30.2 percent of the 882,439-pound private recreational allocation, through June 14. Healthy pace, comfortably under quota, so there's plenty of runway for a summer reef trip, no need to rush the calendar to beat a closure.

The summer tournament calendar. Nothing on the Fourth itself, then it picks up fast. The Faux Pas Lodge Invitational runs the last weekend of July out of the Venice Marina, the Empire South Pass Tarpon Rodeo lands July 30 to August 1, and the New Orleans Invitational billfish tournament fishes out of Cypress Cove in August. If you're planning a trip around a tournament weekend, those are the dates.

Next week, the first real catch reports off the holiday weekend once the offshore numbers post, an updated read on the river and the tide as we head toward the new moon, and whether the five-fish weekend was as good as the setup. If you fished the Fourth, hit reply with intel , attribution on request or off the record. And if you know somebody planning a Venice trip this summer, forward this along.

Have a good Fourth. Fish early, get off the water when it lights up, and put them in the bag.

Until next Thursday.

Joey