Barrier Island Bounty
Aug 08
The Isle Dernier Chain provides explosive fishing—but the islands’ future is uncertain—
The constant topwater action on speckled trout in the Trinity Island surf belied the reports.
Word from Capt. George Landry of Beachcomber Guide Service, our guide for the day, was the trout were in a typical late summer pattern. They were on the move, hard to locate and unlikely to be that day’s target.
So, the plan for the early August fishing trip to the barrier islands of Terrebonne Parish for a group of about a dozen Louisiana outdoor writers was to look for redfish in the 15-30 pound range in the passes and then hunt and peck for smaller reds in the marsh on the way back to the dock about 15 miles north of the islands near the small fishing community of Dularge.
Instead, after spending about 45 minutes battling big reds near the west end of Raccoon Island, the western-most in a string of barrier islands known as the Isle Dernier Chain, word spread among the four boats in our party that the trout bite was smoking hot in the surf two islands to the east at Trinity.
Idling into the Trinity Island surf, the signs of trout feeding heavily were unmistakable. Four-inch shrimp jumped from the crests of the light chop near the sand while the water underneath them boiled and sea gulls hovered just above the surface waiting to snag the shrimp as the fish pushed them to the surface.
Since there’s no finer way to catch any fish than watching them explode on a topwater plug, a red and white Rapala surface lure quickly replaced the soft plastic jig tied to my line. First cast yielded a nice 15-inch trout. Ten out of the next 15 casts resulted in the same.
Fish cleared the gunwales of the boat for the next two hours then it was time to head back to the dock through the maze of shallow passes and subsided marsh of lower Terrebonne. The return ride gave Capt. Landry time to reflect and talk about the profound changes to his home parish over the last half century.
“I usually don’t like to run back through the passes and the marsh this way because it has changed so much in the last 10 years it’s hard to know what you’re running over,” said the 55-year old Landry, who has been a charter captain for 15 years and an avid hunter and fisherman his entire life. “When I was a kid and I came out to these islands with my dad and my uncles, all of this open water was marsh and these islands were much, much bigger. You used to be able to come out here in a 16-foot flat boat. Now, it seems like you need a 24-foot boat just to deal with all of this open water.”
Every veteran Louisiana coastal angler has a similar story. Landry’s beloved Terrebonne Parish marshes and barrier islands are home to the fastest rate of landloss in the world and indicative of the kind of erosion and subsidence that is plaguing more or less all of Louisiana’s coastal habitats.
In the mid-19th century, the Isle Dernier Chain was not a chain at all, but a contiguous inhabited island home to a couple hundred people and a large resort hotel. A series of hurricanes and the cutting off of the sediment supply to the island with dams and levees throughout the lower Mississippi River and its distributaries over the last 150-plus years has broken what was once Louisiana’s largest barrier island into four smaller spits of sand named Last, Trinity, Whiskey and Raccoon.
All four play a vital role in providing fish and bird habitat as well as protection from wave action and storm surges for the marshes and communities of lower Terrebonne. Raccoon is the Gulf of Mexico’s largest brown pelican rookery and serves as nesting ground for many other species of sea birds. Flocks of pelicans and gulls can blacken the sky at times, and the noise from all of cackles and shrieks is often deafening. All four islands are also constantly washing away as is the marsh behind them.
Projects built by the state and federal partners working through the Coastal Wetlands Planning Protection and Restoration Act (CWPPRA) over the last 20 years have gone a long way in helping keep the islands in place. Segmented rock breakwaters built on the gulf side of Raccoon have helped keep the beach intact and also served as sediment traps to prevent sand traveling with currents from east to west from washing away completely.
An aggressive project completed in 2010 at Whiskey Island restored about 2.5 miles of beach and dune as well as building nearly 300 acres of marsh along the backside of the island using sand and mud pumped by a dredge from an offshore deposit. Both projects aim to extend the life of the islands by as much as 20 years. Both could also be washed away with the next major hurricane that hits the northern Gulf Coast.
The long-term salvation for the islands could lie in the construction of the Terrebonne Basin Barrier Shoreline Project that was approved for construction by Congress in the 2007 Water Resources Development Act (WRDA). This aggressive, large-scale effort aims to rejuvenate all four islands by closing in beach breaches, building dunes and marshes and planting native vegetation.
The 2007 WRDA also contained a project designed to move water and sediment from the Atchafalaya Basin east into Terrebonne Parish to try and curb the saltwater intrusion that has devastated the area’s fresh and brackish marshes for more than 50 years.
State and local officials are pushing to move these projects through federal bureaucracies as quickly as possible, knowing the longer they take to build, the more these fragile islands and coastal marshes will wash away.
Like most Congressionally-approved coastal restoration projects, the Terrebonne Basin Barrier Shoreline and the Atchafalaya Basin projects languish in wait for bureaucratic approvals and funding, which can often take decades that these islands and wetlands don’t have.
The hope among many Terrebonne Parish residents is that funding can be found soon, possibly with the passage of recently-introduced legislation in Congress that would direct Clean Water Act penalties levied against BP to the Gulf Coast for ecosystem restoration projects.
The bill, called the RESTORE the Gulf Coast Act of 2011, still has a long way to go before becoming law. But, there is at least a glimmer of hope that one of the world’s most productive fishing and nesting grounds will be given the chance to survive for generations to come.
“The fishing out here throughout my life has been so good at times I can hardly describe it or explain it to people who aren’t from here,” Landry said. “But if these islands wash away more and more, I’m not sure what the fishing’s going to be like in the future.”
