Rather than temping fate in more bawdy destinations, a group of Cajun Country highschoolers opted to spend their senior trip with fishing rods in their hands.
Ten New Iberians came back with the sunburns absorbed during so many hours of activities on and around the water, which isn’t surprising for recently graduated high schoolers on a senior trip. What is surprising was the venue they chose. Austin Green, Zack Schaubert, Beau Watkins, Corey Romero, Royce Boyer, Trey Hebert, Kenson Verret, Lance Bertrand, Stoney LeBlanc and my son, Jacob Shoopman, chose a week-long fishing trip over the more traditional senior trips to destinations such as Cancun or the beaches of Florida.
To a man, each said he preferred a sobering experience in the great outdoors to a chance to get into trouble abroad, as some of our nation’s best and brightest young minds have done, some tragically.
Green, Schaubert, Watkins, Romero, Boyer, Hebert, Verret, Bertrand, LeBlanc and Shoopman got their diplomas from New Iberia Senior High on May 18, and headed to Lake Fausse Pointe State Park to check in the afternoon of May 22.
So before they punched the clock for their summer jobs, or showed up on the college campus of their choice, they relaxed at one of the most beautiful and well-kept state parks in the Sportsman’s Paradise. And fished, and fished, and fished.
It’s cool how a fishing pole and worm or cricket brings out the little boy in even the roughest, toughest men of any age. That was the theme, and the young men played it to the hilt after they arrived in six vehicles towing boats.
They weren’t choirboys out there, not by a longshot. There was some loud music, some animated conversations, some salty language, some ventures into the night to look for snakes and armadillos or to drive on the levee, some minor contacts with the park wardens, some harmless disagreements.
But no one passed out from alcohol, no handcuffs were slapped on any wrists, no malicious acts were performed.
There were, however, loaded guns in the cabin. That was discovered around check-out time the last day when the refrigerator door was opened and the lid to the butter bin lifted to reveal half-a-dozen or so colorful water pistols, chilled and ready to go.
The ’fridge in each cabin held other interesting items, such as beef liver that on the first night almost got put into the rice dressing before it was realized at the last minute it was catfish bait. And small, round cardboard containers of earthworms cooled their heels on one of the shelves most of the week.
Worms. Crickets. Ice. Gas. Insect repellent. Besides food, those were the most cherished items. Each family put up $200 to cover all that and split the rental cost of each cabin ($90 a night for four nights).
The proud graduates ate like kings thanks to a menu planned by the parents with meats and other foodstuffs ordered by Zack’s mother, Julie, from Bi-Lo Supermarket. Austin’s father, Troy Green, a NISH graduate, scheduled the meals and showed up the fourth night to fry the bream and catfish in a restaurant-style fryer.
They got two ribracks with the steaks cut 1-inch thick, seasoned and packaged; two briskets to serve 12 to 14 people; 40 homemade hamburger patties; 20 stuffed potatoes; prepared chicken spaghetti to feed 16; 10 loaves of garlic bread; five loaves of jalapeno cheese bread, and 10 pounds of sliced deli ham.
It was quite a spread that complemented 20 bags of chips, six gallons of milk, two gallons of orange juice, one brick of sliced cheese, two cans of biscuits, nine boxes of cereal, plus dozens of non-alcoholic drinks, mostly water and soda.
The grads always showed up around lunch time and supper time. Otherwise, most of the boats were gone from the dock the two rental cabins share.
Austin mined the bream beds in a nearby double borrow pit, also known as “twin ponds,” relying on a deft touch with the long pole he used for a fishing rod. He preferred to use crickets, but didn’t hesitate to stick a worm on the business end of the hook.
He’s going to Nicholls State University with tentative plans to major in business starting in January. If that doesn’t work out, he said, he plans to pursue a career with the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
Austin, who turned 18 on June 13, said he originally thought he’d be in Panama City, Fla., on a senior trip. Besides a personal reason for declining to go the Sunshine State, he just didn’t want to be a part of that scene, so he jumped at the offer made by Zachary, who had talked to Beau and then asked Jacob.
“There ain’t no sense going to the beach and getting drunk,” Austin said.
“I had a blast,” he said about the senior trip the night before the group broke camp.
He especially remembered the first afternoon of fishing. He tore the bull bream up.
“That’s the most I caught in one day (during the trip). I started messing with those little baby bream. I put on a small, small bream hook,” he said.
He was right at home on the water. That was apparent.
“I grew up on the Basin side (of the West Atchafalaya Basin Protection Levee). We used to have a camp. I was out there since I was 9 months old. My dad said he was changing my diapers in the woods,” he said.
My, how they’ve grown. Austin and the others had a little more than diapers on a week after graduation.
Shorts, sandals and baseball caps were the order of the day and, even, into the night. There was no fashion code to adhere to, no school uniform to wear.
The grads dressed for the occasion.
“It was hot,” Jacob said.
Jacob and Zack particularly felt the heat on the third day when, just before lunch time, they left in Zack’s homemade aluminum boat to run trotlines several miles up the borrow pit canal, up around the Bayou Benoit Bridge. The two made it to the first trotline, then ran out of gas.
Back at the cabins, the campers enjoyed ham sandwiches and chips, most under the impression that Jacob and Zack decided to go fishing somewhere in Lake Dauterive-Fausse Pointe. Many took a long nap, including chaperone Ricky Watkins, Beau’s father.
Ricky got up later in the afternoon and asked about Jacob and Zack. Told they had gone to check trotlines, someone also mentioned that they hadn’t taken fishing poles.
No, indeed. With no trolling motor, and the wind blowing against them, the two missing campers resigned themselves to the situation. Zack put up the boat’s T-top.
Usually, boats run up and down the borrow pit canal all the time. They never saw one, which was rotten luck.
“I told Zack, ‘I get the first shot with the flare’” if the sun set with them still out there, Jacob said with a chuckle.
“It was pretty neat. We had MREs (beenie-weenies, Vienna sausage, apple sauce, Oreos, vanilla cookies, Nestle iced tea) that Zack had gotten from the hurricane. The government had given him a bunch, so he keeps them in the boat. We snacked on (Cajun) hot peanuts the whole time,” he said.
They also listened to the radio, had no luck contacting anyone via a VHF unit in the boat, and took a two-hour nap, in the shade provided by the T-top at anchor. Later, they tied long lengths of rope together and fastened the anchor to one end, then took turns swimming out as far as the ropes would let them, drop the anchor, and pull the boat about 200 yards.
Six hours after they left, Beau and I set out to find them. He had an idea where they might be.
We should have taken some extra gas but didn’t. We found them far from the state park and towed them back on step most of the way.
I called them Gilligan and Skipper after that episode, and sang (or tried to sing, it was pretty pitiful) the “Gilligan’s Island” ditty with the refrain “a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour” with the appropriate substitution of a “half-hour tour,” which is what their trotline trip was meant to be.
Oh, well, all’s well that ends well. We had a lot of yuks at their expense.
Those MREs Jacob and Zack dined on were reminders of Hurricane Rita that hit last September. Twelve hours after it made landfall in Southwest Louisiana, a wall of water surged into areas far to the east, including lower Iberia Parish.
Zack and Austin, who live in that area, relived the hurricane one night into the wee hours of the morning with Ricky and me. They talked matter-of-factly, but you could feel that it still affected them deeply because of the way it impacted lives and property.
That storm was at the beginning of their senior year in high school. It followed on the heels of the disastrous Hurricane Katrina, which caused so much misery and pain in and around New Orleans.
Who would have thought that another major storm would pulverize the coast in less than a month?
Austin said the first thing he and his dad did was to retrieve all their hunting rifles and shotguns and roll them up in a comforter for transportation out of harm’s way. When Zack spoke about it, it was as if he could still see in disbelief the water coming up the countryside, inundating a pond and creeping toward the house.
He helped put furniture in the house up on tall bricks. He remembered driving a four-wheeler to pull pigs to safety as water sprayed over the handlebars.
Zack, who turned 18 on June 10, and Austin also were two of the biggest hunters in the group of grads. Zack said he hunts deer, ducks, wild hogs and doves while Austin said he hunts “anything that moves and is legal, fair game.” Austin and his dad have a deer lease near Natchitoches.
Austin said he also used to hunt rabbits religiously in the Atchafalaya Basin. But when the camp was sold, that pretty much signaled the end to that, he said.
All of them fished, some more than others. The diehard bream fishermen apparently were Jacob, Austin, Corey and Beau, with Trey and Royce getting their share. Stoney and Zack enjoyed setting out trotlines, although Beau devoted two months to saving up one-gallon plastic milk jugs that were put out, baited and run with the help of most of the grads.
Hydro-sliding was more up the alley for Kenson, Royce, Stoney and Lance.
Stoney marked his 18th birthday on the last day of the senior trip, May 26. He was all smiles after spending a week at the state park, happy to pick that way to spend a high school graduation trip.
The personable grad really got into the bream fishing, especially the time “me and Beau racked up.”
“I used to (fish) but not any more. I kind of slacked off,” he said.
Stoney, who plans to major in mechanical engineering at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, said he’ll probably get back into fishing.
Ricky and I spent mornings and evenings (before cooking time) bass fishing in his high-performance aluminum boat, and keeping an eye on the whereabouts of the boys.
Ricky — who works with his father, Elmo, in the family’s business, Watkins Floor Covering — proved why he was part of the three-peat champion two-man team with Michel Fox on the local Lipari’s Outdoors Adventures Hawg Fight circuit that fishes every other Wednesday evening from May through July. He caught bass consistently, despite some tough conditions, on wacky worms, topwaters and Zoom Brush Hogs while fishing the Texaco Field, Bird Island Chute and Borrow Pit Canal.
While fishing, Ricky said many times that the area desperately needed some rain and the lake’s bass fishery needed a shot in the arm from stocking Florida bass fingerlings via the LDWF and the old Teche Area Big Shot Bass Tournament, of which he was proud to participate for years as it raised money to buy bass for the lake every spring from a private fish hatchery in Oklahoma.
While bassin’ wasn’t the main order of the day for any of the younger campers, the bug eventually bit Beau, Jacob, Corey and Trey. Beau and Jacob, who will attend Southeastern Louisiana University, have caught plenty of bass while fishing with their dads, so Beau took Trey and Jacob took Corey.
Trey and Corey will remember the senior trip for another special reason. Each caught the first bass of his life — Trey’s on a buzz bait and Corey’s on a Pop-R.
They were fishing in Coon Slough North, a shallow spawning area.
“I said, ‘Lunchbox (Corey), you’ve got to set the hook,’” Jacob recalled with a chuckle.
“That was pretty exciting. I normally do catfishing. Bream, too,” Corey said.
The two paired up for another bass fishing trip the last afternoon, and caught several more bass, with Jacob getting two on his favorite Bomber crankbait, and Corey connecting on a white, single-bladed spinnerbait in Ceabon Canal. That was the coup de grace for Corey, who teamed up with Jacob the previous morning to win a bream tournament against the other guys and split $40.
“It was easy. We were getting bites every cast. We caught about 30 bream (biggest 10 were for the scale) and five small catfish in two hours and decided to come back,” Jacob said.
Corey, who celebrated his 18th birthday a few days after the senior trip, on May 30, said he decided to go on the senior trip because it “seemed like the better thing to do. It seemed like more fun.”
The UL-Lafayette-bound student, who plans to major in architecture, said he wasn’t disappointed and that he enjoyed the outing tremendously.
“Oh, yeah, definitely,” he said. “Just being able to fish all day and being around everybody I know. Everybody has a good attitude.”
Beau, an avid duck hunter and a standout soccer player who hopes to continue his career at a college in Nebraska, echoed that sentiment.
“I had fun the whole week,” he said.
Hey, it might catch on. They all talked one night, fairly earnestly, about making it an annual trip — the whole bunch — just before Memorial Day.
They’ll call it a reunion next time. Fish on!
