Atchafalaya

Friday, January 13, 2006

Found some great trails and potential island campsites east of Lake Palourde, on Bayou Cheramie. Went with Paula down to Burns Point, on East Cote Blanche bay. We motored slowly through some small bayous north of the point, and must have seen seven or eight alligators. Surprising for January, but it was a sunny day. We got out of there, got stuck, got unstuck, and continued in the bayous south of the state park. No alligators. These bayous looked like they get a lot more people, though.

Went on a kayak trip on the islands off the coast of Mississippi. From Pascagoula out to east Horn Island, then down to west Horn the next day. My old landmarks on Horn are gone. It's unrecognizable. I think the island has lost about half a mile of land from the east.

The next morning the wind was too strong, so we stayed on a little sand island we found just off the end of Horn. The wind was so strong, blown sand was filling in our footprints. We rounded up every scrap of stuff we could find on the island to build a wind shelter to hunker down behind. I read a book about Shackleton, the polar explorer.

The next morning the wind had calmed, so we paddled over to East Ship Island, then West Ship and Cat, where we spent the night. In the morning we paddled in to Long Beach, which has been destroyed.

James 6:03 PM [+]
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Today I saw:
A sun dog;
One bald eagle;
two osprey, one holding a fish and one catching a fish and flying off with it to the top of a huge old cypress tree;
the tugboat Bayou Dog pushing a barge downstream;
three steaming sugar mills, smelling sweet and sour;
one abandoned sugar mill, rusting under vines;

Beautiful day today on Bayou Teche. I rode 65 miles, from Jeanerette to Centerville, yesterday's start point. I stopped at Lejeune's Bakery in Jeanerette to pick up a loaf of french bread for the trip. A sign pointed to the side door, which led into the back rooms of the bakery. Everything was dark, covered with flour and old, but clean. The owner was a pleasant Cajun lady in her late eighties, at least.
I'll add more tomorrow.

James 10:40 PM [+]
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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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Another interesting day in the Basin. Stung twice by wasps, saw a beaver. Shawn, Ian and I went to Upper Grand River Flats. East side of the Basin. Nice, black water and scattered cypress. Up towards the end we got bogged down in water hyacinth a half mile short of a cut leading back into the borrow canal. The water's high, so we made a break for it through woods. On the way we saw an enormous beaver sitting placidly on a log. Then Shawn ran into a wasp nest, emitting three sharp yelps. Then, right before we got free, I felt a burning in my neck and on my thumb.

James 10:34 PM [+]
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We got all the buoys hung out. God knows if they're still there or not. We cooked up a sort of modular system so we could toss them over the side without any serious prep; just hook the weights on one end, the buoy on the other, and drop it.
We hung a bunch, then came back later to find a couple of them had drifted upriver. It's a mystery. We dragged them to shallower water.
I don't think the buoys are going to be enough. We've got eight left, but the gap is about a half-mile between each. This part of the Basin is pretty straightforward. Some parts of the Basin are wide, full of trees, easy to get lost. This is mostly a pretty clear channel with cypress on the west and willows on the east. The willows are a sign the Basin is filling in. They're the first trees to spring up on new ground, so you see them in successive layers in places like riverbends or channel mouths where new sediment is piling up.
So this stretch is pretty easy, but there are still a couple of spots where it gets tricky, where several bayous come together. So we're going to get some pole-style markers to add to the buoys. They'll be easier to handle.

James 7:57 AM [+]
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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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Uwe Neubauer came through about a month ago, and I forgot to post anything about it. A German engineer, he contacted me by e-mail, saying he wanted to spend two weeks paddling and camping in the Basin. Another interesting fellow, Uwe had escaped East Germany when he was younger, then got a doctorate in engineering and spent a lot of time travelling. He had been to the Amazon, Namibia, the Yukon and several other places. He had read C.C. Lockwood's book years before and decided he wanted to see the Basin.
I picked him up at the Greyhound station in Baton Rouge, and after a night with us, brought him to The Levee Landing on Bayou Courtableau, the put-in for the Upper Courtableau trail. Tanya Dupre, the owner, was paying some of her patrons in boiled crawfish and beer to build her an awning. Uwe began to set up his folding canoe. As the work wound down, the erstwhile carpenters drifted over the see what was going on. Uwe was missing some parts, probably due to careless bag inspections in New Orleans. The locals offered some suggestions, and then invited him to eat crawfish with them. They seemed to get along famously. I picked him up eleven days later in Morgan City, and after getting him cleaned up and fed, dropped him at a car rental in Lafayette. Uwe said he plans to emigrate to northern Canada to be a hunter and a trapper!

James 4:03 PM [+]
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Paddled down Big Alabama Bayou with Shawn Jolet on March 31, then did Little Bayou Pigeon and Cross Bayou to Murphy Lake, on the east side of the Basin with a group yesterday. First, Big Alabama. See the pictures here.

Big Alabama is very nice, with wide spots and narrow, a good mix of trees (not too many willows) and not much current. We put in at the upper end at a fairly crude boat ramp, after a several mile long shuttle run down to the other end. The roads can be kind of confusing if you don't know them, but after one time it's easy to figure out.

Little Bayou Pigeon and Murphy Lake were fun. The group was Shawn Jolet, Mike Bass and Scott Hitter in a two-man kayak, Robert Landreneau in another, Dave Snyder and myself. We put in at the larger boat ramp above Bayou Pigeon. There were about 150 cars and boat trailers parked there. We started paddling, and soon discovered that boaters on the east side of the Basin are less inclined to slow down for paddlers than those in the west.
I let Mike and Scott take the GPS and lead the way, which worked out pretty well. A couple of miles down Bayou Pigeon, Shawn noticed a cut running off to the south that looked like it would rejoin the main channel quickly. I said okay, let's take it. Probably two hours later, we rejoined the group, after flagging down a friendly fisherman named Mike who gave us a ride. Mike took Dave Snyder back to the landing. Dave hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, and was beat.
After a break, we kept paddling, up into Murphy Lake. Another fisherman told Shawn about a Bald Eagle nesting on one side of the lake. As he got close to it, it flew up and over and out of sight.
We left the lake behind, and turned south and west along a canal back to the landing. There were some beautiful, cypress-lined lakes and cuts along the canal. It makes me wonder what else is out there, cut off from any defined bayou. Near the end of our paddle, a motorboat came up behind us, bearing Dean Wilson and a group of tourists out on a swamp tour. Dean is trying to become the Riverkeeper for the Atchafalaya Basin, and finds out tomorrow. Dean's got an interesting story. Originally from Spain, he came to Louisiana to train himself up for the Amazon, and ended up staying. He's been running a swamp tour boat out of Bayou Sorrel for some years now, and is very concerned with the environment. And you can't help but be, out there. Every time I go out now, I see fresh sedimentation. It's scary.

James 3:53 PM [+]
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Finished proofing the GPS route through Bayou Gravenburg yesterday, with two other kayakers, Shawn and Jeramie. On the way back, Jeramie found a fairly stiff Gar hanging from somebody's fishing line. Pictures are here. Gravenburg is a cypress and tupelo swamp, like Bayou Benoit, but bigger. A lot of crawfishermen have traps back in there, and somebody has kindly marked a route by nailing bucket lids to some of the trees.
You have to paddle down a river to get to Gravenburg, and make your way through a narrow little cut lined with sycamores and swamp maples. If you miss the cut, there's another that's usually a short portage, a little further down.
Really, the way to do this paddle is to take the river all the way to the bottom, about three miles, and then paddle back up through the swamp.
I'm going to put up a page on the forum for each of the trails as we proof the points, and start modifying the trails page.

James 8:23 AM [+]
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Just added some pictures of paddling Little Alabama Bayou, Bayou Gravenburg, Sherburne trail, and Alligator Bayou on the forum's picture page.

James 5:41 PM [+]
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Took a group paddling in Bayou Benoit yesterday. Benoit is a sprawling cypress and tupelo swamp that runs a couple of miles north and south along the levee near Lake Fausse Pointe. We put in around 9:30 and meandered our way up through the trees for a couple of hours to a shady cypress grove where we stopped and had lunch. Then we saddled up and paddle back in about an hour. Benoit is as nice as Bayou Gravenburg, but with less water hyacinth. The usual anhinga and egrets were out, as well as several osprey.

James 2:49 PM [+]
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Went on our first overnight paddle trip into the Basin last weekend. Six of us: Bill Lindsey and David Singleton from Texas, local political reporter Lou Rom and his son Gabriel, local contractor Shawn Jolet and myself.
We put in at Butte La Rose boat launch and paddled down the Little Atchafalaya for about eleven miles until we passed some guys at a camp on the riverbank. We were about six miles from our planned destination, but they invited us to stop, so we pulled over. Their camp was made out of an old silver-painted ARCO oil storage tank, about a hundred feet across and three stories high. They had built a house inside the tank, and added a porch, windows and doors to the outside. It was pretty impressive to look at. They had everything from a welder to a washer and drier. Lou had flipped earlier, so we cleaned his clothes. After the introductions and a tour, we got down to business: dinner. We agreed to contribute our few steaks to their huge stockpile of hamburger, and soon sat down to one of the best rice-and-gravy dinners I've had, definitely the best I've had while kayaking. Then we got a fire going, and drifted off from there one by one to sleep in tents or bunks. The next morning they jumped up and made a great breakfast for everyone and saw us off. I'm sending them APT hats as soon as I get them made.
The rest of the trip was nice but uneventful. We made our way down Bayou Crook Chene and Alligator Bayou, crossed the Grand River and ate lunch, then pushed another mile-and-a-half upstream in the rain to a little boat ramp. The rain made a mist form over the water that was kind of nice.
Spring is here. Last week I took a Canadian couple paddling around Lake Henderson. The gray skies and gray of the Spanish Moss combined gave a kind of wintery effect that was nice, in a way, but since then everything seems to be blooming and budding and generally pushing forth the green. The first sign was a baby spider water-skiing behind its silk thread.

James 1:49 AM [+]
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We got all of our insurance issues resolved, and now we'll be leading a bunch of trips in the Basin to check out all the trails. I can't wait.

We are also about to get all of our issues worked out about the trail down the Bayou Teche and trails in St. Mary parish.

James 12:38 PM [+]
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Led a canoe trip in the Basin over the last two weekends. The first weekend we paddled down Bayou Courtableau again, and up the Gremin Canal back to a landing just south of the put-in. I've never seen the water so low. There's a bend in the bayou a little over halfway to the intersection of Bayou Fordoche and Bayou Mamsella that's had a tree in it for years now. Every time I come to that bend, it's tough getting across the log. This time we went under it with about three feet of headroom. All in all, I had to get out of my kayak about five times that day to help drag people's boats over logs. I was thoroughly soaked.
The day didn't start too well. It was rainy and cool, and I got a call from one of the guys with the Corps of Engineers who said the levee road, which we were going to take from our meeting spot to the put-in, was too muddy to drive. I got directions for an alternate route, but decided to go with a guy who jumped in and said, "I know the way!"
He didn't.
The next day we paddled down Bayou Berard to Catahoula and ate lunch in the city park. It was a much nicer day, and an easy paddle.
This weekend went much better. I decided to scrap the long paddle I had in mind for a couple of paddles around Lake Henderson. The water hyacinth was high and a strong north wind was blowing. There is a nice cypress grove on the west side which shelters you from the wind. If it's coming from the north, you paddle north through it, cross over the top of the lake under I-10, and let the wind push you back south. I think everybody had a good time.
Then we paddled over to Rabbit Island and pitched our tents. We started to make a gumbo, and people started coming out of the woodwork to show us how to do it. They even brought extra ingredients, which was nice. We just stood back and watched them go. A nice couple motored up in their houseboat. We had met them a couple of days before while we were out looking Rabbit Island. They brought us on board and took us right to it.
The gumbo was excellent, and we had marshmallows for dessert. The weather was cool, and I slept great. The next morning I woke to the sun shining through a thick mist over the water. We headed back to the landing, picked up some more people and headed north to the Dixie Pipeline canal. We put in there and did a short loop.

James 1:49 PM [+]
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Paddled down Bayou Courtableau yesterday, outside the Basin. From Washington, a little town north of Ville Platte to Port Barre. It was hot. The river was smelly, for parts of it, at least. We went on the trip to recon the river for the Bayou Teche Canoe Trail and to prepare for the September river cleanup by marking all the half-sunken appliances and trash piles. We only saw four or five fridges, a handful of other appliances and a few trash piles. Not too bad. The landing in Washington was pretty bare-bones and not well maintained, but it was clean. I think with part of the trail money we should see if we can do some plantings around these landings, something that maintains itself but still looks nice. The river was mid-level scenic, but not bad. Saw a few small gators, a kingfisher and a heron. It took us about five hours to make the trip. It was shady much of the way. The Port Barre boat ramp was also pretty bare, but clean. Port Barre's ramp is in the heart of town, while the Washington ramp is on the outskirts. Next week I've got to do the Teche from Port Barre to Arnaudville, to get ready for the cleanup. I've also got to recon the route from Myette Point, down near Franklin, up through Blue Point Chute and Duck Lake to Morgan City for October's trip. (We're planning a two-weekend voyage through the Basin from north to south. Food, music and camping. Lots of fun, if everything works out. Mutiny if it doesn't.) We're also planning a "Haunted Swamp Tour" with McGee's Landing for Halloween, for a fun fundraiser.

James 5:02 PM [+]
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Went on an evening paddle trip at Lake Henderson on Saturday. Lake Henderson is a big open area dotted with cypress trees and stumps that for many represents the Atchafalaya Basin: they see it when they drive on Interstate 10, which crosses right over the middle of it. It was a nice paddle trip; we put in at McGee's Landing and paddled northeast toward I-10. We stopped in a cypress grove, then turned west through patchy hydrilla (a lakebottom nuisance weed) to the Dogleg Canal, then back south to Harry Broussard's floating camp. Harry, a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, returned and built himself a small, rustic floating camp out in the Lake. He used to be called the Doughnut Bomber, because he'd drop bags of doughnuts on people in other camps from a small plane. Some skills are too good to waste, I guess. We stopped there and swam until the last of daylight, when the mosquitoes came out. After that, we fled back to McGee's to eat and drink and listen to Cajun music.

James 9:31 AM [+]
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Bayou Tortue, or turtle, is a small black-watered bayou running off the Vermilion just north of Lafayette Airport. Bayou Tortue and the low area around it act as a flood-relief valve when we get heavy rains around here. When that happens, the coulees in the city fill up and drain into the bayou. (Coulees are the word here for concrete-lined drainage channels) The city, in a very straightforward fashion, has built a lot of coulees in town. They drain the water, more or less, from the city after the torrential rains we get around here. The problem comes when we have more than a day or two of rain: the Vermilion starts to flow north. When it does, it floods in and around Bayou Tortue. The water can flow in pretty fast, and tends to come out slowly. A lot of heavier stuff piles up back there; refrigerators, bathtubs and so forth. There's a lake at the end of Bayou Tortue. The bayou meanders on from there, but I've never been able to go much further back except in high water, and then the channel's hard to find. The lake, Lake Charlo, is nice. Lots of buttonbush for the birds. It's not a major rookery, as far as I can tell, maybe because the lake's only about a foot deep at the best of times. I wonder, because Lake Charlo and Lake Martin form bookends to a large circular area called Cypress Island, which is owned by the Nature Conservancy. Lake Martin is a huge rookery for ibis, roseate spoonbills, egrets, herons and other birds. It's also a very popular tourist destination. Lake Martin is also about a thirty times the size of Lake Charlo.
I went paddling back to Lake Charlo this morning with three other people. One works for the Nature Conservancy, and the other is a history graduate student working on a program with a local Cajun heritage theme park to build a traditional motorboat. They want to take people up and down the river, and were thinking of Lake Charlo. I think the shallow water might cause trouble. Bayou Tortue itself is very nice, with a good diversity of plant species; (swamp red maple, cypress, water oak) and not too much black willow. The water itself was stagnant in spots. The Vermilion's got some nice spots on it, too. Two other options they have are to keep going up the river to a canal that connects the Vermilion to the Teche via Lake Martin, or even farther to The Nature Station, a nice city-run nature trail and RV park on the north end of town.

James 4:11 PM [+]
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Updated our trails page so now it has a funky map; thanks to Carol Roberts at UT for inspiring me with her design.
We're planning our trip through the Atchafalaya Basin for October; the Sierra Club is sponsoring their second "Experience Atchafalaya Days", and we're doing a north-south trip, calling it "South by Southeast". I'm hoping for a two-weekend barrage of food, music and paddling.
What else? We've got a board of directors now, plus some kayaks to rent.
Since I last wrote, I've taken three or four groups out into the Basin. One, a father-daughter team, paddled everywhere. North Henderson Loop, Lake Henderson and Lake Martin. They loved it. Later I took a group of Boy Scouts down Bayou Courtableau and back up the Gremin Canal. That was a long day. The group kept expanding and contracting, accordion style, and I kept losing touch with the people in the back. They were a little young for Boy Scouts - more twelve and thirteen year olds. They get tired easily, I think. When I'm leading a group, I keep an ear out for the sound of paddles hitting the sides of the boat; that means they're losing steam.
Also took out a couple of groups of juvenile probationers. We got them to a duck blind, where they all said they were craving a cigarette. They were also pretty young.
A couple of guys from Missouri came down and I led them from Lake Fausse Pointe through Grand Avoille Cove (where we had to portage over the levee) to Oscar Island, where we spent the night, and then to Calumet landing. They had a really good time, even though we got eaten by every bug in Louisiana on Oscar Island. The island is a small, densely vegetated speck of land in the middle of Grand Lake just south of Myette Point. It's an okay campsite in the summer, probably great in the fall and winter.

James 1:00 PM [+]
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Tommy Warder with the Atchafalaya Basin Program and I got out in the Basin today and marked the west side of Lake Henderson from the mouth of Bayou Fordoche down to just above I-10. We got in the water around 11:30 and were out at 4:30. The boat we used had a dead battery, so we had to buy another. Mark Allemand and his father, from McGee's Landing, were a huge help. They tried to recharge our battery, and helped us replace it.
It was another beautiful day out on the water, with cool breezes and bright sunshine. Lots of duck hunters were out, going back and forth to their blinds. Some stopped and chatted briefly while we worked our way down the channels.

James 6:20 PM [+]
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We marked the upper part of the Lake Henderson trail yesterday. Bobby Dickerson and Paula Thibodeaux came, as well as two newcomers: Ray Broussard and Hal Gilder. Both brought their boats. Hal has a nice fiberglass center console boat, which was easy to work from. Ray went with Bobby and Paula, which worked out well. Bobby carried the 4x4's on his boat while Paula and Ray did the piledriving from Ray's smaller boat.
Our homemade post pounder, also called a mother-in-law, turned out not to fit over a wet 4x4, and I wound up having to use it as a hammer of sorts. Back to the drawing board on that one.
Paula said the urge to use the bathroom sprang on her as soon as the boat she was in pulled away from the dock. Up near the top of the lake there are some houseboats piled up on the side of a channel; Paula said she nearly stopped at one where some hunters were cleaning ducks, but when she got close enough, she saw they were wearing pink tighty-whities. She decided to wait.
Hal and I ran into a pair in a canoe on Lake Fordoche, who said they had found the trail on our website. They put in at the Dixie Pipeline canal, and were paddling upstream. Dixie Pipeline might be a good spot for our next kiosk.
Tommy Warder and I will be back out there Monday to mark more trail.

James 9:24 AM [+]
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We marked the trail down Bayou Courtableau, just in time for the official opening on November 10. It took two days and three boats to do the job. Dee Goldman and Dave Fisher from the Corps of Engineers office in Port Barre helped the first day; we marked the upper half of the trail. I learned to bring my GPS along; we started at the middle of the trail and tried working our way back up, but took a wrong turn and wandered in the swamp for 40 minutes. Then we got in at the top and worked our way down, and found our mistake. The next day, Phil Fontenot and Bobby Dickerson showed up with their boats, and we marked the lower half of the trail. I found out it's best to schedule more than one boat...Bobby's boat had a dead battery. This was just as well, because it was a really nice bass boat, not meant for the choked and winding passages of the upper part of the trail.
Bobby made a comeback for the opening ceremony: we had everyone paddle down the trail to the halfway point, and turn off into the base of the Gremitt Canal, which loops back up near the top of the trail. There we met Bobby in his boat and Paul Miller and his party barge. They towed the paddlers back upstream. The tow proceeded without incident until the very end. When we tried to pull up to a grassy bank, the current caught Paul's barge broadside and swept it against two pilings. Pandemonium ensued. Spooked, everybody took off when they hit the shore, and didn't stick around for an after-action review. We had actually practiced the whole trip-and-tow setup for Experience Atchafalaya Days in October, but there wasn't much current back then.
This coming Saturday and Monday, we're off again to mark the trail down to the levee in Henderson. There are some really nice sections that come off of Lake Fordoche heading east and west, and bend to the south.

James 12:55 PM [+]
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I saw a snake eating a catfish today. We took a group of Explorer Scouts paddling at Henderson; this time we went down the east side looking for a gap to some of the bayous that run north and south further east, so we could make a loop. It wasn't happening today. We didn't get to plan out the trip ahead of time, either. I did plug some points into the GPS last night, but then changed my mind and forgot to update the points. I think having a printout of the route ahead of time is a must; either that or a mapping GPS. Another method that occured to me out there was to just plug a number of waypoints into the GPS, mark them on the map, and paddle to them as needed. I brought the plant materials, but didn't go over them. When we had a break, the kids (and I) started talking...We did go over navigation techniques on the water, and did have an after-action review with some of the older kids afterwards (we didn't feel like we were helping, bring a bigger lunch) and passed on some tips for handing paddle trips. For instance: if you don't say not to at the beginning of a trip, there's always someone who wants to charge out ahead at some point, usually on the way back. That's okay, as long as the group doesn't get so spread out you can't help someone if there's trouble. So, you end up having to say something. We also stopped at Harry Broussard's floating camp and swam, which was easily the biggest hit of the day, but mostly for the adults; the kids didn't swim.

James 6:19 PM [+]
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