A bright spotlight shot over the bow of the boat, piercing the darkness ahead and illuminating tupelos hung heavy with Spanish moss. Mysterious green eyes peered back from the water’s edge.

In the background I could almost hear the Oak Ridge Boys singing, “Down in the swampland, anything goes. ... It’s alligator bait and the bars don’t close.”

Welcome to Houma, La. — Capt. Anthony Kyzar’s playground.

Kyzar, 35, operates Cajun Fishing and Hunting Charters. He has prowled the Louisiana bayous, as he says, “since I could walk.” His real living comes from working for Chevron on an offshore oil rig — one week on, one week off. During the off weeks, he guides folks on hunting and fishing trips.

This one included me and two other Tennesseans, Ross Malone and Charlie Duggan.

The captain’s big “Go-Devil” engine — specially designed for shallow water and mounted on an 18-foot flat-bottom boat — ground the gumbo mud to a froth. Even in the dark we could see a sea of mud flats and stumps. Nutria, rodents that resemble overgrown muskrats, scurried out of the boat’s path.

Capt. Kyzar weaved the boat through a maze of canals for nearly 30 minutes. I knew that only an expert could successfully guide us back to civilization.

Most guides do only hunting trips or fishing trips, or they might be seasonal — fishing part of the year, hunting during other parts. Kyzar specializes in doing both in the same day.

“The real attraction to me is the duck-hunting and fishing combo trip that I’m running,” he said.

As daylight broke over the bayou, helicopters buzzed high overhead, carrying people and cargo to and from the oil rigs. Beneath the helicopters, teal zipped across the decoys, flashing in and out of the morning gloom long before anyone could get a gun to shoulder.

The Louisiana bayous are the end of the line for many North American waterfowl — the wintertime home for teal, gadwalls, pintails and a variety of others.

The morning passed quickly, interspersed with gunfire at ducks that couldn’t resist the decoys and awe toward an incredible array of other birds. Virtually every kind of shorebird imaginable crisscrossed the sky: ibis, several varieties of herons, pelicans, gulls, egrets, sandpipers, snipe, cormorants and assorted mystery birds.

After a few hours of waterfowling, we stowed the guns and brought out the fishing rods. Kyzar always has redfish as an ace in the hole.

A chartreuse float slapped the surface, carrying a black plastic jig tipped with fresh shrimp. Malone gave his rod tip two or three quick snaps and the float plunged beneath the surface as a hefty redfish decided it wanted shrimp for lunch.

The pattern was repeated multiple times.

Kyzar said this section of Louisiana is the largest estuary system in the Southeastern United States.

“As a result,” he said, “we have the largest area for fish to rest, spawn and feed. We have abundant bait — mullet, crabs, just everything for the fish to eat. In Florida where you may go out and catch one or two redfish, here you’ll go out and catch 20 or 30 redfish.”

Make that 50 or 60 redfish — the number we caught each day in three to four hours of fishing.

“It’s like fishing a bluegill bed on Chickamauga Lake, except the fish are huge,” Malone exclaimed as a redfish peeled line off his reel.

In Louisiana, the daily limit on “reds” is five per person, with only one fish per person over 27 inches long. Kyzar said he couldn’t remember many, if any days, that he and his customers made it back to the truck without limits.

“Every day, I can guarantee it,” he said. “It’s going to be limits of redfish.”

Duggan strained to keep his rod tip high as a “bull red” plowed across the canal.

“This one is serious,” Duggan said with a grin.

Many minutes later, the captain slid the net beneath the biggest fish of the trip. Two days of fishing yielded more than 200 pounds of redfish with plenty of fillets that fit perfectly in Tennessee freezers.

In late spring and summer, Kyzar moves his fishing about 30 miles south.

“Our fishing is just as good in the summertime,” he said. “We’ve got 20 miles of beach that borders the Gulf of Mexico at Terrabonne and Timbalier bays. The speckled trout migrate out there to spawn in April, and they’re there through August. It’s just as easy as pie.”

He admitted he’s got a lot of competition from other guides that time of year but said few offer the hunting and fishing “combos.”

As we wound our way back out of the maze of tupelos and cypress trees, schools of redfish scurried out of our path. Everybody in the boat groaned a little as Kyzar complained, “Man, I’ve got to come out here and work again tomorrow.”