Not much remains of this St. Bernard Parish town.
No one can deny it’s Larry Frey’s name on the deed.
But he doesn’t own this land.
Like many of his neighbors, Frey discovered a few weeks back that his Delacroix property isn’t his at all. He merely leases it from Mother Nature, a temperamental, cantankerous hag of a landlord.
On Aug. 29, without filing any legal documentation or providing fair warning, she broke the terms of the deal, blowing into town and reclaiming what was hers.
Frey and his camp-owning neighbors are left with little of what they thought was theirs on Aug. 28, a seeming eternity ago, and they’re wondering whether it’s wise to sign another long-term lease.
Louisiana Sportsman staffer Andy Crawford and I returned with Frey to his Delacroix property Oct. 10 to survey the damage and see first-hand how the area has changed in this miserable post-Katrina world.
Every angler has a port that he calls his own. He might go with his cousin Joe to unfamiliar waters where the sac-a-lait are jumping in the boat or follow a friend’s hot tip about redfish in Bayou X, but he’ll always have that one section of water that’s near and dear to his heart.
For me, that section of water begins where Highway 300 ends. My job has afforded me the pleasure over the last dozen years to fish across the coast of Louisiana with some of the best anglers in the state. The waters around every port offer their own unique charm and attraction, and it’s seldom a great challenge to see why people love them.
But nine times out of 10, if I’m going fishing for pure pleasure, I’m going to Delacroix. It’s where my heart is.
That same heart was heavier than any blacksmith’s anvil when I viewed Delacroix last month for the first time since Katrina. It was Frey’s third trip to the island, so he had tried to prepare me for what I’d see.
“You’re not going to know where you are,” he said. “All of the landmarks are gone.”
But no detailed description or perfectly focused digital photo of the area could soften the blow of what I saw along the shores of Bayou Terre aux Bouefs. For me, that bayou had always been the gateway to heaven, a mere glimpse of it lightening my heart, but when Katrina’s brick-hard eyewall smacked directly into Delacroix, Terre aux Bouefs became the highway to hell.
Most of what had been on the banks of Terre aux Bouefs now lies smashed, broken and strewn in the bayou itself.
Actually, “bayou” isn’t a fair word to use. “Bayou” Terre aux Bouefs is no longer a bayou over much of its course. It’s entirely filled in, from bank to bank, with sediment, cordgrass, felled trees, bricks, washing machines, Buicks and the like.
All along what was once the bayou, on both banks, are stairways that lead to nothing, a chilling reminder — as if one were necessary — that people’s lives have been forever changed.
Between the Junction and Reggio Marina, the charming cottages that shared history with the stately, moss-draped oaks in their yards are all gone. Like many of the houses and camps farther down Highway 300 that were built at or just above ground level, they were grabbed, shaken and ripped from their foundations by the violent waters that Katrina pushed from the Gulf.
Only a few of the modern camps, built at 16 feet or higher, according to recent code changes, remain, but none are unscathed. Frey’s, which is just a few hundred yards north of the still-standing water tower, still has four walls and most of the roof, but much of the floor is missing, a sobering testament to the height of Katrina’s surge.
Just a few lots down, nothing but brick columns mark the spot where a Baptist Mission had been built less than a decade ago.
But of more historical significance to anglers who have fished Delacroix for years is the loss of Rudy Melerine’s store just a block or so down. Melerine’s serviced the recreational fishing industry until the mid 1990s, when Rudy ran into health problems and his son, Kirk, opted out of the profession.
Also destroyed by Katrina was the raised house in which the family lived behind the store. Much of its frame still remains, but it’s in a piled heap.
Farther down the road, what had been a far more active landmark — Serigne’s — is also gone. The corrugated metal building that housed the marina store is nowhere to be found, although the high pilings and frames that supported the hoists are still in tact. Between them are the three concrete bait wells that were the temporary homes of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of cocahoes, croakers and shrimp over the years.
The metal boat sheds that had rimmed the parking area across the highway are entirely gone. In fact, little evidence remains that there ever were boat sheds there.
According to unconfirmed reports from Lionel Serigne Jr., his father has no plans to rebuild.
Past Serigne’s, a palatial, two-story camp, built high on stilts, appears to be the only structure that wasn’t substantially marred by Katrina. Frey debunks this, pointing out that the camp sustained significant roof damage.
Little is in tact between this camp and End of the World Marina, which looks far worse than anticipated. The cinder-block building that housed apartments and the marina owner’s home is now a pile — a short pile — of rubble. The backdown ramp remains, but is in deplorable shape, and the bridge at the end of the marina canal is dilapidated, blocking all water-borne access.
The roofs of the boat sheds lining the canals, remarkably still in tact, are covered with withering cordgrass. One supports two refrigerators.
It was a mind-numbing journey down Highway 300 that left us nearly speechless.
“This is like Disney World,” Frey said, drawing a curious comparison. “You can’t see it all in one day. Every time I come down here, I see something I hadn’t seen before.”
One thing none of us had seen was the marsh, and that was our intention for the day. We also wanted to check on the trout and redfish stocks. I had interviewed a number of biologists after the storm, and all were confident that the specks and reds fared far better in Katrina than the humans who chase them did. But no one could confirm that with anecdotal evidence.
So with much effort, we managed to get Frey’s flat boat into Bayou Terre aux Bouefs south of Bayou Lery, where Terre aux Bouefs is still a free-flowing bayou.
Frey wanted to check on the condition of his duck lease north of Lake Lery, so we motored up the bayou and into the lake. Other than the complete absence of any submergent aquatic vegetation, Lery looked normal, its surface flat and peaceful, showing no evidence of the tumult of recent weeks.
We stopped to fish a canal mouth on the south side of Lery, and were overjoyed to hook a trout — an actual speckled trout — on a cork-suspended chartreuse grub.
After a few fruitless casts, we motored to another canal mouth on the north shore of Lery, and picked up two more trout. We moved over to the canal that marks the edge of Frey’s lease, caught another trout, and then moved in closer to the shoreline to survey Frey’s lease.
He was shocked and dismayed to find that the entire north side of his lease had been turned to open water. The solid marshland that supported and shrouded him and his buddies for 20 years was gone.
Frey could only shake his head.
“What are you going to do?” he asked rhetorically. “This is the hand that was dealt us.”
We turned and made our way back across Lake Lery. Our desire was to get to Grand Lake, but we weren’t sure of the navigability of the canal that would take us there directly, so we motored back through Bayou Lery, down Terre aux Bouefs and into Bayou Gentilly.
Before Katrina, this winding bayou was Delacroix’s version of an interstate highway. Boats ran north and south on it all day, heading to and from Delacroix’s storied hotspots.
Those days are over. Bayou Gentilly is now a pond with indistinct banks and littered with marsh islands of all sizes.
Before Katrina, I could have run Gentilly blind-folded. I knew it, literally, as well as I know my residential neighborhood. Many frigid winter mornings, I navigated the bayou with dreams of cupped ducks in my sleepy head and not even a moon overhead to light my way.
But on that day, I was lost before I was 200 yards into the bayou.
Crawford stood on the bow looking for imperceptible channels while Frey steered and I snapped pictures and watched the depth finder. Nearly all of the bayou was 2 feet deep or less, and we were there at the absolute peak of high tide.
Several times we ran aground.
None of us could believe what we were experiencing.
Finally, we navigated and pushed our way through, and by the time we got to the section of the bayou that parallels the pipeline near Little Lake, it opened up. Still, the deepest water we could find in that section was 4 feet.
We motored into Little Lake, and turned the bow into Alligator Pass. Although our intention was to fish the shoreline of Grand Lake closer to Bayou Long, we could see gulls diving at the mouth of the pass entering the lake, so we eased our way over and began casting.
The action began instantly and was fierce in its intensity. Our corks barely had time to float before keeper specks and occasional redfish pulled them under. Apparently, the biologists were right.
“O.K.,” Frey said after we put our 25th trout in the boat. “We know we can stay here and catch all we want. Let’s see where else the trout are.”
Crawford and I agreed, and we made a few quick stops between Grand Lake and Lake Batola, catching fish in all of them. We rounded out our limits on the eastern end of Lake Batola, and left a school of fish that were biting on every cast.
It was the first coastal fishing action any of us had seen since Katrina, that storm that will forever be remembered in the annals of Louisiana history, roared ashore.
The fishery revealed many clues to its health. The trout were active everywhere, and nary a lake or bayou could be found whose surface wasn’t perpetually broken by popping shrimp.
On our day on the water, we were the only boat in the marsh, which seemed surprisingly eerie, and it was clear the fish had been completely unpressured for six weeks. Not only were they extraordinarily abundant, they aggressively attacked artificial baits. As most Delacroix regulars know, October is one of the months when live shrimp always outproduce artificials.
Fisheries biologist Jerald Horst acknowledged that any anglers able to get out will notice a marked increase in their fishing success.
“In recent years, we’ve had ho-hum recruiting classes. Couple that with an absolute explosion in fishing pressure, and everyone’s piece of pie has gotten littler,” he said. “Now, if you’ve still got a home and a boat and a way to get out there, you’ll get your slice and your neighbor’s too.”
That fact is certain to increase the desire of Louisiana’s hard-core recreational fishermen, who have been essentially locked out of most of the coast since late August.
How soon the infrastructure will be in place to service those anglers is anyone’s guess.
St. Bernard Parish councilman Ricky Melerine, whose district includes Delacroix, said access to the area will be restricted for the foreseeable future.
During our trip to the area, sheriff’s deputies manned a checkpoint on Paris Road and another in front of what used to be the Junction Food Store.
“There will be checkpoints there for a while, at least until we have people living in the area again,” Melerine said. “We’re trying to protect the houses that remain.”
He predicted it would take several more months for Delacroix and other outlying areas to be repowered.
Frey, for one, doesn’t know if he can wait that long.
“Maybe I can bring a generator in here, and just stay in the two rooms of my camp that still have a floor,” he said.
