Atchafalaya

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Saw a bald eagle and two ultralight aircraft today. We motored twenty miles down Bayou Teche from Centerville to Morgan City. I originally planned to turn around at Calumet, but the locks into Wax Lake Outlet were open, so we crossed the outlet and kept going.

It was a beautiful day, sunny and cold. The east bank of the Teche is mostly willows or cypresses. The west bank is more developed, with homes and camps yielding to small shipyards and oilfield service places as you go south. Where the Teche widened above Morgan City there was a nice sandy island on the left that would make a good campsite for a night.

Ian and I saw some beautiful homes, boats in various stages of life and people fishing. We saw two former Coast Guard cutters being retooled for the Gulf. They had very flat bows, almost like a landing craft. We went over and talked to some of the guys working on them. They told us the boats were a hybrid catamaran-hovercraft, and could do forty knots. They had rubbery cells underneath, visible from the front.
One of the boats had a series of pot-leaf decals, which the guys on board said represented fifteen-ton pot busts.

We also saw the Sea Lady, a forty- or fifty-foot crew boat, in good condition but unfinished, sitting on the bank with Virginia creeper growing up the side. It looked like the hull had been assembled and given a coat of primer, and that was it.

James 10:17 PM [+]
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