Atchafalaya

Wednesday, June 09, 2004

It's been a crazy couple of months. We got a great writeup in the Times-Picayune, the New Orleans paper. We've been proofing trails on the east side of the Basin, near Stephensville, Louisiana. The Basin is nicer over there; it's a flooded forest of cypress and tupelo that stretches for miles. Winding through it are dozens, hundreds, of trails marked with flagging tape the crawfishermen follow to run their traps. It's great, because you can paddle for hours in this green twilight, occasionally spotting a giant old cypress looming up amid all the others. It's like seeing an elephant.
Shawn Jolet and I paddled one weekend in the Bayou Pigeon area. We went out on Little Bayou Pigeon to Lake Runnells, then turned north into Bayou Mallet and east into Bayou Postilion through some old oilfield canals. These canals are everywhere, and it's hard to tell them from the real thing. Most have high banks, which is unusual over there. We took Big Bayou Mallet into the top of Postilion. Most of this back half of the trip was through a frustrating morass of weeds. Very hard to paddle through. I'm not sure what causes this. Most of the floating and bottom-growing vegetation around here is invasive, but it's been here for a while. I'm guessing there's some extra nitrogen out there from something. We did see two pairs of hawks.
We camped on the levee. The next day we paddled again. After we finished, we bellied up to this bar attached to a gas station to eat a pizza. A crawfisherman at the bar told us about another bar up the road called The Bloody Bucket. "They like to fight up there," the bartender said. I told the board this would be a great location for a fundraiser event. I hear the bar is in a trailer. Not unheard of around here, but indicative of a choice clientele.
Now we're marking trails with buoys on the east side of the Basin. We're moving down Bayou Berard to Lake Fausse Pointe. I've got a fourteen-year-old volunteer working with me. The kid is great. He works hard, and can drive a boat well. We're borrowing Dave Allemond's skiff, a flat-bottomed job welded out of thick aluminum, originally a six-seat tour boat near New Orleans. The thing's got a 200 horsepower outboard on it. It gave me a couple of heart-stopping moments the other day, when the kid got it up to 50 miles an hour (!) You've got to watch it, because if you get the nose going to one side it digs in and down and feels like it's going to roll completely over, in a sort of accelerating-demise fashion that reminds me of those graphs of increasingly unstable oscillations from calculus.
We had a hard time the first several days; before we borrowed Dave's skiff, we were using Paul Miller's party barge, which you would think would be the perfect platform for hanging buoys. It would be, except it broke down, leaving us stranded in the river for two hours until Shawn could come and get us. We motored back up the river tied side-to-side. Shawn has been an unbelievable help. It was his idea to make anchors for the buoys out of cement-filled flower pots. We spent two days out of doors in Charenton and Henderson being bit by mosquitoes while we poured cement into the pots, out of his cement mixer. It was my idea to stick a small tube of PVC down the center. Now we just run the anchor cable through the tube, clamp it on itself, and toss it overboard. The first day we did two, in the wrong place. Then two in the right place. Then four. Four more. Today, eight. I think we're getting it. Tomorrow I think we'll finish Bayou Berard. Next we start on the other side. If we can finish that this weekend, I'll be ecstatic. After that, we tackle the campsite.

James 7:26 PM [+]
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