Atchafalaya Basin People: Chapter 25

Continued from Chapter 24

DATE:                        December 26, 1995 

INTERVIEWER:      Jim Delahoussaye

LOCATIONS:           Residence of EJ Daigle and his wife Blue, at 1400 Milling St., Franklin, Louisiana,  70538.

COOPERATORS:   EJ Daigle, Blue Daigle

JD:      …at [EJ Daigle’s] house, this is the third tape today, and this is still December 26, 1995.  We talking about 1.5-volt batteries that…people used to sew into…or put into a pack and carry on their backs.  Now what were you saying about em?

EJ:      The reason we did that, the batteries would last longer and uh, you could get more time for your money on em.  Rather than buyin individual batteries for about a dollar apiece every day.  These four batteries [would] last you maybe two weeks. 

JD:      Hmm.  Where did you get those…where did you get those batteries?  Do you remember? 

EJ:      Different hardware places.  Uh, Mr. Medric used to get em sometimes.  Uncle Myon used to pick some up different places where he used to pick up his supplies.  He’d sell batteries at the lake, stuff like that. 

JD:      I heard for the first time this morning that Myon was kind of a, a land-based fishboat. ..  He just took over where the fishboats left off on the lake and would bring y’all’s fish up to sell em in Calumet, I guess it was?

EJ:      Well that’s how he earned his living.  Three, four cents a pound, and go up to the docks twice a week, ., about a Tuesday and Saturday, and uh, bring the fish up to the docks.  Anybody had orders, he’d take the orders and bring em.  Bring supplies back.  He’d bring loads of ice, slide ice blocks down the levee to the old iceboxes.  ..  And uh, we had the old insulated boxes, wasn’t any type of electrical refrigeration, ..  And uh, I picked up quite a few blocks of ice and hauled inside [laughs]. 

JD:      Hm.  How big were the blocks? 

EJ:      Fifty pounds usually.  Something you could handle, he’d break em up.  He’d buy em at the old ice house here in Franklin and break em up into smaller blocks. 

JD:      What kind of vehicle did he have to do all this with? 

EJ:      He had an old 1950 model Chevrolet pickup…green truck.  He worked out [of] that thing for a long time.  But, uh, he pretty well kept, you know, gas…well, he didn’t earn a big livin, but he earned a living without any real labor.  ..

JD:      He provided a convenience so to speak.

EJ:      A service, and uh, ., earned a meager living… besides…he never was much of line fisherman, he never fished lines very much. .  A few hoopnets, and they’d do good with the crabs in the summer.  But uh, otherwise he’d buy line fish and net fish and…

JD:      Well, let me ask you this, then, uh, when…when…do you have information about when they used to live across the lake on Blaise’s Canal, and so on?  Was Myon not a line fisherman then?

EJ:      Uh, in those days most people fished goujons, ., local fish.  ..  And uh, what they called linefishing [in] those days, today we couldn’t even begin to leave the leave the door [not worth going out for that few hooks].  Two hundred hooks a day, go run em in the morning, come back at the camp, go back in the evening and run em again.  That’s how they lived.

JD:      You talking about…were those bushlines or bentlines? 

EJ:      Both, . both.  They fished the bushlines in the stumps and bentlines in the summertimes…live perch and live shads, they always had perch traps in the lil sloughs in the swamps where they catching live perch. ..  And, uh, strictly local.  Two or three bents of line in one place, live bait.  Pick it up the next day and move it somewhere else.  ..  Fishing these big fish. 

JD:      Now…by local you talking about they fished in dead water all the time?

EJ:      Well, that’s how the lake was - pretty much dead water.

JD:      The other side of the lake?

EJ:      Yeah, the eastern side of the old swamp.  ..  And uh, their style of fishing I can still remember as a real small [child].  Alvin Mayon, one of Momma’s uncles, every time the fish boats would come, he’d come grab me and walk over all the cribs – everybody had their own cribs with their fish cars, kept fish alive in em.

JD:      Cribs, cribs and fish cars are the same things? Or not? 

EJ:      A crib is a log…a log floatation with logs.

JD:      That’s what y’all called it?  Crib?

EJ:      Take logs and bind em together, called cribs.  And uh, have openings in em where the fish cars – live boxes, made out of one inch lats or so, something like that, two inch lats with space between em.  And just sink em down into the cribs and keep the fish alive, ..  Fish boats come around once or twice a week and pick up the fish ., and deliver groceries, stuff like that.  And old uncle…Uncle Alvin, there, he used to be what all the old people used to term as king of the goujon fishermen ., local fishermen.  ..  And always, “Come see” he called me Pushtoon [sp?].  He say “Come see my big fish”, you know, and he’d go around showing us all the big fish that he had.  I can remember that well.  But uh, this was when we were livin up Blue Point, William’s Canal, Big Pigeon…those places. 

JD:      Now, you lived on the houseboats for awhile? 

EJ:      Umhm.

JD:      You really did, as a young boy .?  You remember about what age you were when…when y’all moved to the levee…not to the levee, but to Myon’s Canal?

EJ:      When we moved to Myon’s Canal, Leroy was just big enough to uh, to walk, so I had to be about four years old, three or four years old. 

JD:      You were three or four years old? ..  You just reminded me of something.  .. Uh, what’s your birthday?

EJ:      December 19, 1942. 

JD:      12/19…

EJ:      ’42. 

JD:      OK, 12/19/’42.  And you were about five years old when y’all crossed the lake to Myon’s Canal?

EJ:      No, I was younger than that. ..  Yeah, younger than that, because we were over the levee and I started school and I was five then.  Started school at five…September of my fifth birthday. 

JD:      And you have memories before y’all crossed the lake? 

EJ:      Before…before that.

JD:      That’s amazing.  You have memories when y’all lived in the canal in a campboat across the lake?

EJ:      Umhm.  I can remember pockets across the lake used to have acorn trees.   Used to have big acorns ., big overcup acorns, you know?  I can remember that far back.  ..  As a matter of fact, I can remember when my daddy still had his camp in The Pit, at Morgan City, before we moved up the lake.  Uh, when, uh…

JD:      This is important, I need to know about this.  So, so, so your daddy had his camp…Jesse Daigle had his camp in The Pit in Morgan City…

EJ:      Tied right by my grandma’s house…

JD:      Rosalie?

EJ:      No, Ernestine ..  And I can remember that far back.  I can remember the furniture, even.  ..  That’s when Leroy was first born, I was two years old.  Leroy was sick, sickly child, and we had to move to town in order to try to get him…get him well.  ..  I remember that.

JD:      So y’all moved on a campboat from The Pit at Morgan City up the lake someplace ..  Was it to Blaise’s Canal, you have any idea?

EJ:      It’s in that area, I have no idea which canal it was, but it’s normally Blaise’s Canal or, or Big Pigeon, or Lil Pigeon…one of those up in that area. 

JD:      Yeah, yeah.  Uh, this is the way I…I date things.  ..  To find out when…

EJ:      To set it all…all…in…one scenario, matching scenario.

JD:      Exactly.  Exactly, by when you were born, when you remember somebody else went someplace, who was married, who got born…you can pretty well place a year because…by this way I’ve been able to pretty well ascertain that the first campboats crossed the levee about 1945 to ’46, somewhere in there.  That’s what I’ve been able to…

EJ:      Uh, ’42, I was born in ’42, about ’47.  ..  We were just over the levee not long before I started school.  ..

JD:      What Blue? 

Blue:  I was telling him [that’s] just about right.  He said they moved out there [when] he was about four years old.  ..  I’m born in ’46, and he’s born in ’42 …

EJ:      Bootsie [Millet] was the first man to pull over the levee.  ..  Bootsie, then my daddy, and then it was either Mr. Lester or Mr. Lyle.  Edward’s momma and daddy [Lester Couvillier].  One of the two followed…and then Myon and them came over. ..  Reason I remember so well, they had a herd…a humongous heard of cattle on that levee.

JD:      They did?  These were the…this was the community that was in Myon’s Canal apparently, in 1945 ..  Uh, Edward was there, Myon was there, Rosalie Mayon was there.  I think that’s, uh, that’s Neg’s mother…

EJ:      Yeah, that’s my grandma. 

JD:      Yeah, Neg’s momma…

EJ:      Grandma Sauce. 

JD:      Uh, the Gondolfos were there, all of em?  Apparently John.

EJ:      They were…they were, uh, I can remember, as a kid going into Bayou Grue, and Mr. Pete Gondolfo was still on Bayou Grue.  ..  He had a big, big hill there with uh, fruit trees of all kinds.  ..  I can remember Rochelle[?] picking oranges and throwing us oranges out of the boat.  We’d go in there to fish the perch, for the live bait for goujons and stuff ..  And I can remember that.  When they came over the levee, I can’t, I can’t remember. 

JD:      They been told to me that they were the first ones to pull over the levee, in 1945.  Does that sound…do you have anything that would say that’s not right?

EJ:      No, I couldn’t remember that.  I can remember what was going on in the lil corner at the canal, as a child .. 

JD:      It’s amazing that you can remember what you can.  Abner Couvillier was early and, uh, so was Albert…that’s Myon’s…I mean Edward’s daddy.

EJ:      Edward’s daddy, I think he was after us, ., you see?  Cause you remember where Bernie Louviere used to live?  . That’s where my daddy pulled up.  ..  And when my lil brother drowned, couple months later, Daddy wanted to leave, didn’t want to stay there no more.  So we traded…we traded uh, our house on the bank for Joe Sauce’s campboat, which is Jack’s, uh, Sauce’s daddy.  ..  And uh, we moved…we moved to Bayou Boutte.

JD:      Y’all were still in the lake when your lil brother drowned?

EJ:      No, we was…we were over the levee.  He snuck over the levee and got in a pirogue and…in the wintertime…January or February and fell over and drowned…was ten years old ..  Snuck over the levee.  But…

JD:      You say y’all moved to Bayou Boutte?

EJ:      Yeah, we went back to Bayou Boutte. 

JD:      On land?

EJ:      No, on campboat. 

JD:      So y’all went back to a campboat from livin on the backside of the levee?  ..  Back to a campboat and moved to Bayou Boutte.

EJ:      Moved to Bayou Boutte right across from where Bayou Chene comes into Bayou Boutte.  Used to have a slip there, and uh, Junior Scadlock had house on the bank there and we moved in the slip right next to Momma’s brother, Bob Sauce.  He was in the slip with us, right there.  ..  And we stayed there…I don’t know the time frame…but it wasn’t very long Daddy came down with a stroke. 

JD:      He had the stroke on Bayou Boutte?  In the swamp.

EJ:      Umhm.  Got up one morning had a stroke, . and uh, then we brought the camp back to Myette Pt. and uh…where he could go see doctors, whatever, you know?  And uh, we stayed in the houseboat for a while, we were one of the last houseboats left in the canal…goin over.

JD:      Because y’all had come back and gone back again.

EJ:      So we caught a high water…they caught a high water where [you] could get up along the levee, and pulled it over where Momma was livin, again.  ..  We went over the levee twice. 

JD:      I see, I see, so y’all were one of the last ones to pull over, then.  ..  Any way you could remember about when that was, when y’all came back and pulled back over the second time?  ..  The first time y’all came over, did you start goin to school right away when y’all first came over? 

EJ:      At the lil Myette Pt. Mission.  I just started school in September ..  My brother drowned that winter, then we moved back to Bayou Boutte.

JD:      Ok, so you dropped out of school then for a while.  ..

EJ:      And then…I’d have to ask Momma, I don’t know the timeframe [of] how long that was the time we moved back to Boutte…[and] we came back.  But I don’t remember spending a winter over there.  Yes I do, yes I do!  We spent one winter over there.  And if I told you why I remember, you’d never believe it. 

JD:      [laughs] You want me to turn the tape off?  Is it OK?

EJ:      No, [laughs] that don’t matter.  I got…[remembers] I got…one of Bob Sauce’s kids, Barbara, but she’s…but she’s dead, she died of diabetes eight ten years ago, I guess.  And she was real heavy heavy.  And hell, when they had to go the bathroom they’d hang it over the side of the barge. . And I can remember it was cold and rainy and I could see her behind sticking out the back of the barge using the bathroom [laughs].  That’s how I associate that winter with it!  [laughs].  I say “Look at that, cold as it is, look at that!” [laughs]

Blue:  Boy, I tell you!

JD:      Well, I don’t imagine anybody had any choice when it came to that.

EJ:      No.  No, not in those days.  Just living in a barge…and he had a…he had a pile of kids, all livin in one…one room, you know. 

JD:      Joe Sauce did?

EJ:      No, this was Bob Sauce, Robert Sauce. ..  At the boat landing in Calumet, that’s where he died last year.  And uh, I can remember that!  But the whole family in one lil old shack, there.  ..  So I’m sure we were there one winter, cause I remember that being cold.  So, it seems the following spring, uh, . it was pretty much in the summertime ‘cause I can remember the preacher by the name of Einstein, Eystein Einstein, something like that from Patterson.  Used to come up to a lil Baptist mission up there, and he’s the one put Daddy in the boat, after he had the stroke, and brought us all in.  He had a big inboard some kind, big wooden bateau…. and brought us…brought us in. 

JD:      How incapacitated was your father with that stroke? 

EJ:      He never really recovered.  Uh, he did a lil fishing after that, after a few years, uh, we had taken the barge that, uh, we’d pulled over the levee from our other camp. We had the barge.  And Momma’s kitchen, just the kitchen, we built that camp…we built that camp…on that barge. 

JD:      One room.

EJ:      One room, just a bedroom.  That lil camp…took it to Belleview [canal] and we stayed there fishin as best he could for a lil while.  Mostly Momma fishin with him, and stuff like that.  But after that, the camp…we brought back…and he never went out again.  He’d fish a lil bit with our help, he couldn’t dip shads, or throw a castnet, or nothing, you know? 

JD:      Was his mind affected by what he did?

EJ:      Uh, yeah.

JD:      I meant…I guess what meant by…what I meant was, his speech and uh…

EJ:      Yeah.  At first, and then he recovered, uh, pretty well but…if he’d a had today…today’s therapy, he would have recovered totally.  But, he did have the arm [impaired], he just couldn’t…couldn’t hold bait in his left hand [to] hook it.  He had to actually learn to bait the opposite hand…., you know, to bait hooks.  . But uh, I think a lot of Daddy’s problem, especially once that stroke hit, got to learn to think with the other side [of] the brain.  Those days, they didn’t know anything about that. .. And uh, he just couldn’t get his brain, you know, right again, as far as…  Oh, he did a lot of things, he…but he’d really have to uh, struggle with it and work at it.  And when they came up with the lil welfare check, well [he said] “If I go try to work I’m gone lose the check”.  ..  Catch 22 situation, . for $64 a month.  .. 

JD:      Well, uh, like I was telling Joe this morning, every time…every time you say one thing when you start something like we’re doing right here, it opens up ten more questions out there that all have some bearing…

EJ:      Something correlates somewhere…

JD:      Exactly.  Exactly.  And like I’ve told people, I’ve said this could take five years, it could take ten years, seven years to do.  Just because of all the research that…every time we talk for an hour it takes me three hours to transcribe it ., onto paper.  Um, the other people that apparently were living in Myon’s Canal, as things were starting to come over the levee, was apparently Bootsie Millet was living there, uh, Joe Sauce was living there, y’all, and Dan Lange.

EJ:      You see, you see when we first…everybody first moved to Myette Pt. canal, they were at the mouth of the canal. 

JD:      That’s what I…well, that makes sense . because there wasn’t any reason to be connected to the  [land]…

EJ:      Umhm.  And at one time they had a little, uh, uh, oil field pocket right in the lil cut, and that’s where my Daddy had his camp, in that oil field pocket.

JD:      Isn’t there still a… a break in the levee?

EJ:      Well, this oil field pocket was in the cut itself ..  In the cut itself, and that how…that’s how I can associate how young I was because I remember Leroy, uh, falling over in the rocker and cutting the end of his finger off.  He was just big enough to stand up in the rocker and the rocker…Leroy was two years younger than me.  And uh, so he was just about a year old…so I couldn’t have been more than three or four.  . at the most, and uh, I remember that part of it.  But, but before the lil levee, you see, at Myette Pt., that goes all the way around, where the shad point used to be, . the current used to run crazy around that thing.

JD:      Still runs pretty good there.

EJ:      Not like it used to.  Not one tenth of what it used to.  ..  Cause see, all the river, when the water’s flood[ing], they had no river channel to keep…to keep the flow in the channel…the current would run down against the western lake…....it would run along the western levee and sweep down off of Myette Pt. and turn south ..  And it would go thru the woods there at ninety miles an hour ..  And those days, with the lil air-cooleds and Lockwoods you were…you were very careful how you got caught in that current.   And uh, everybody…the current at the mouth of the canal would get so strong everybody was concerned about it.  So, one year Daddy and Bootsie Millet took a shovel and they dug that levee with a shovel.

JD:      Dug it?

EJ:      Where Myon’s Canal goes out?  . There was a levee across…there was a levee across that canal.

JD:      There was a levee across the mouth of it?

EJ:      You see where the levee from this side goes?  Where the two canals fork, ., where the levee follows it?  And the levee at Myon’s Canal comes up?  That levee used to cross…that was solid levee.  ..

JD:      So that was a pocket?  Myon’s Canal was a pocket?

EJ:      Pocket.  They couldn’t get…they couldn’t get uh, camps in there.  ..  So Bootsie and Daddy dug that levee with shovels, in order to when the rivers would rise they could get the camps in a safer harbor, rather than being out in that current. 

JD:      So what the camps ended up doing was going closer to the…to the levee ., uh, than that pocket…than that corner with that pocket with the current going around it?

EJ:      Umhm.  You see, you had the lil levee from all the way where the boat landing is now, that levee came all the way down ., and made the turn and came back to the main levee…and it was dead water in there.  You see,  and none of that…none of that headwater, until the Corps of Engineers, when they rebuilt the levee, they cut those gaps in that lil levee, to get their digging equipment out there to rebuild that levee ..  And that’s when the current started comin thru inside the levee ..  See, and everybody uh…that was a deadwater area and the campboats were safe inside…

JD:      What’s that canal?  Was Myon’s Canal one of those original Southcoast canals that was dug to, uh, to drain the agricultural fields?

EJ:      Well, evidently, it must have been.  I really don’t know, but uh…

JD:      The levee just cut across it?  The big levee? . Just cut across it…?

EJ:      Umhm.  You see, before they built the big levee the farmers used to have this levee ..  You still got the old flood gate…I don’t know if you ever been to it…

JD:      Yeah, those two concrete things stickin up?

EJ:      Yeah, well, all the way from Bayou Grue…the levee used to come out at Bayou Grue like this, make a turn and go all the way down to Myette Pt. and come back down.  And there’s another one like that down at Belleview. 

JD:      And that was to hold that agricultural drainage water…?

EJ:      Stop the…stop the…stop the flood waters from coming into the fields.

JD:      Oh, I thought it was the other way around…

EJ:      See, that’s before the Basin was built.  They did that to keep the flood waters out…out of the fields.  And uh,…

JD:      What I was told was, once they did that, that was well and good, but that meant that all the rain that fell…that wanted to drain, would drain into that pocket and that’s what the pumps were for.  Was to pump the water, from rainwater, out into…

EJ:      Yeah, well you see that’s when they had the pumps down at Belleview.

JD:      That’s what I mean. 

EJ:      But, the small levee used to go along and then turn, and follow the big levee down.  ..  But the levee…what they did…they just came along and threw the big levee over that small levee they had ., because that other lil levee was just…it had a outward curve to it so they just cut across it with the big levee.

JD:      One of these days, not right now, but one of these days I’d like you to draw that for me…what that structure looked like.  ..  I’d really appreciate that.

EJ:      Umhm.  I was to it the other day…that lil flood control thing, you can go into it now.  .. You can get into…inside the levee, since they redug the levee they dug that bar pit ., and you can go in the lake just above where the camps are?  Catch the canal and come right into the levee…..

JD:      So anyway, these are the rest of the people…that uh, were in the canal…at that time.  Joe Sanders, uh, Lester Couvillier apparently, uh, [who was] Put’s daddy, Arthur Sanders, somebody called Nick Verrett.

EJ:      Yeah, but I don’t remember Nick and them pullin over.  You see, Nick was married to Tootsie. Her first husband.  And uncle Plot, well, I have no memories of Uncle Plot being there. 

JD:      He didn’t pull over either, apparently

EJ:      You see Uncle Ike, the way I understand Uncle Ike stayed at the mouth of the canal a little while too.  But he didn’t stay there very long. He went down to Morgan City.  .. 

JD:      So anyway, this is useful, this helps.  Um, so, we finished talking about the 1.5-volt batteries that you could carry on a backpack, so to speak.  Um, this is where I stopped with Joe this morning, we went thru this tools list this morning.  Him talking to me about that.  Now the rest of this, I need to talk about the bait, I mean, the shrimp, shad, black eels, mullets, white eels, crawfish, freshwater shad, perch…and so, all those various things that were used in linefishing. 

EJ:      Also, you got another piece of equipment that’s not in here. ..  The shrimp box.  ..  We never used many of em, but the old people used to…used to use em.  It’s a big old square box with throats in it. 

JD:      I remember that, that long uh,

EJ:      Drop the bait in it…a lil bait in it…the shrimp would [get in]…even on the slime, it would catch shrimp just on the slime…they would work in dead water areas where shrimp trap needs uh, pretty much current. 

JD:      OK, that’s uh, you see this is…this is something we need up here to talk about what it was…what it was built like…how it was built.  Down here I would like to talk about how it was fished ..  See?  Under “bait” we talk about shrimp and all the various ways there are to catch shrimp. ..  This right here could take a long time just to talk about all the various things, from the beginning to now, how y’all catch shrimp. Because I understand y’all just recently found out that you could drop shrimp traps on…on a bent line in 20 feet of water, and come up with shrimp…

EJ:      Yeah, this just in the last 20 years, this stuff…..  But back then, uh, shrimp boxes, shrimp bushes and willow roots were a big, a big help in wintertime.  ..  Get down steep, steep banks with heavy willow roots, and your shrimp were looking for something to hole up in for the winter, and it would, uh, be a smaller shrimp but you would…you could dip em in clear water at night, . when you couldn’t catch em in daytime, and you get your baitin [with] shrimp. ..

JD:      Anyway, I need to talk about all of these things, on the techniques…this is another thing…bentlines.  I already talked about bentlines, I wrote about four pages of what I know about…On this thing I want to talk about how you set em, every detail of how you set em.  What you look for, the kind of water you set em in, all of that.  How far apart you set everything else, all of that.  And I put down as much as I know about bentlines, but then we need to talk about crosslines in bayous or the channel when the water’s low.  Uh, about tightlines, bushlines and we can talk about some…how y’all went about bugging, I understand some people actually made money with it. 

EJ:      Yeah, we did., we did.  It would…lot of times it would be three quarters, all night’s work.   I caught as high as four, five hundred pounds a night on it. 

JD:      Anyway, I was wrong when I said that about this right here.  This is just talking about what was used for bait.  Here’s techniques…. how you went about getting them.  How you did shrimp bushes, dipping willow roots, castnets, uh, dipnet along the levee for crawfish, uh, shrimp traps…wire and wood.  Dipping white eels, how that came about.  How long has that been done, and…

EJ:      That is a very, very old art.  ..  Every since I can remember, people…I can hear Daddy talking about…they’d leave, uh, across the lake when the lake was wide open, to come places like Lake Fausse Pointe or go down [to] Lake Verret, behind the levee, before they had the levees, ., in order to dip white eels.

JD:      Always on a north wind, always on a front?

EJ:      Always on a front. 

JD:      Were those the only two places you know of?  Lake Verret and Lake Fausse Pointe?

EJ:      No.  You had, uh, by Ramah, and uh..

JD:      Up north?

EJ:      No, uh, Bayou Ramas, over here…Morgan City…Lake Palourde?..  Well, when you going out of Morgan City on the old highway, when you cross that first bridge the other side of Amelia, that lil bridge ., little narrow bayou there?  ..  The other side of Siracusa Shipyard down there, at Greenwood?  That’s Bayou Ramas, it comes out into Lake Palourde.

JD:      Now, the one at Fausse Pointe is uh, is uh, a lake that…got a big lake that narrows down into one lil outlet, and the water pours thru that outlet in that north wind.  Is that the same as the Lake Verret one and the Bayou Ramas one?

EJ:      It all works on the same principle, the north winds, uh,…the eels are bottom dwellers, they live in the mud ., and uh, the lake gets shook up enough to where…it causes a…the north winds cause a strong out tide, and the eels come up with the tide and travel with the tide.  And it’s normally the time of the year when they’re migrating out, headed back to where they come from.

JD:      Do we know where that is…come from?

EJ:      I’m told it’s the Grasso Sea.  I don’t know, exactly, if that’s true for this type of eel, but I do know once they’re gone you don’t see em again till the following year. 

JD:      I, I haven’t followed this up yet, and it’s one of the things I will do with this thing.  But this white eel thing, the black eel, it’s an adult in fresh water, and it migrates out to the Sargasso Sea where it lays it’s eggs and has it’s babies, and it dies.  And the babies are the ones that come back up here, and they stay here until they become those big adults and they leave again and go back and breed in the Sargasso Sea.  This little eel that we talking about, this black eel [white eel] seems to be doing the opposite thing.  It’s here as a, as a young one.

EJ:      Yes, ‘cause you got…some years all you have is lil bitty ones up here.  Like this year, there wasn’t hardly any big ones at all. 

JD:      By a “big one”, you’re talking about…?

EJ:      Big as a pencil, ten or twelve inches long ..  That’s a big eel.  Small ones like a…like a number two spaghetti, you know?  Six inches long.

JD: What I’m thinking is that these are very possibly not the same species as…

EJ:      I don’t think they are.  I don’t know, really, what happens to em, but I’ve seen, uh, programs on TV where they actually show em sticking their heads up out the sand and they…[it’s] something to see, I’ve seen em…

JD:      In fresh water? 

EJ:      Right, I’ve seen em filmed.  And uh, it’s, it’s identical eel.  See like Southwest Pass [between Marsh Island and the coast] ?  I’d love to go get white eel out there. 

JD:      You see em in there?

EJ:      You catch em in inch and a half mesh.

JD:      No kidding!

EJ:      Dump em on deck this long, this big around.

JD:      And they are white eels?  Same species?  ..  They’re going to salt water to get bigger and coming back? 

EJ:      And uh, I always did say I’d like to get in the, in the eddy below the number eight light, if it wouldn’t be so rough, with a bateau and a eel net with a light one night, just to see how many I could catch.  Cameron also.  ..  Calcasieu Lake is loaded.

JD:      Is that right?  So they’re not confined to fresh water?

EJ:      No, no, not at all.

JD:      So anyway, we talk about all the different techniques of catching bait for baiting.  And then the last thing I have on the list right now is the, the history of fish transport and sales.  The fishboats that used to come thru, the fish docks, once you got locked here, on the land.  The prices, uh, that traditionally have been paid for catfish, how they were treated, rough, collarbone, fillets, how it was done.  Local handlers that handled em, like Myon.  Prices, and then something about the coop that we tried in 1975, what effect that had.  So that’s the outline.

EJ:      You got a long row to hoe [laughs].

JD:      I think so. 

EJ:      You say, well, just linefishing communities not gone be much, but you start breaking it down…

JD:      You start breaking it down, yes, it sure is, it’s a great deal.  And you realize how much y’all know about this, you know.  Joe thought he could talk to me about 30 minutes and that would be that.  Well, he talked four hours non stop this morning, and we got just this far…we got just this far ..  If, uh, if you don’t mind spending a couple more minutes with me…

EJ:      I’ve got all evening. ..  I’m not doin anything. 

JD:      Would you mind if we would start right here with bait, and we’ll start with shrimp, and we talk about as much as you know…as much as you can think of at one instance like this, to tell me about shrimp as bait for linefishing. 

EJ:      Uh, let’s get back to this for a lil while.

JD:      Ok, ok, he’s pointing at the shrimp box.

EJ:      No, the jigger pole.  ..  That’s a technique that we…we really came up with.  I don’t know if Joe mentioned that.  Nobody used to fish with jigger poles.  ..  Until about 30 years ago, right after I got married.  And everybody would…malls, and hammers and…cut a piece of oak tree, get a big wooden mall and put a handle in it, and we’d drive poles, like we use stobs now, a pole would be at every stob.  ..  And the rivers would get to runnin, like fishin at Belleview in high water, forget it.  You’d fish one or two bents from the bank and that was it, you couldn’t hold a pole. ..  Current be so strong they’d just whip right out the bottom.

JD:      Really!  And anything came along and caught em, too.

EJ:      That’s it, the logs, the drifts, they had water lilies.  ..  It’s a pain in the neck and it’s labor oriented – cutting and dragging these big…I seen me cut 27 foot poles.  ..  You take a pole this big around, eight inches, six, eight inches at the bottom ., you know, in order to drive in deep water you gotta have a good top three [inches].  So you gotta select a pole that’s gonna be, uh, not too taperin… the way up.  ..  And, uh, when we was camping at Belleview, Russell used to tell me how he and his first father-in-law had made a cypress jigger pole where they could use [it] in 40 foot of water.  ..  They take a big cypress tree and they honed it down, and uh, used it to put nets in Bayou Boutte, fished them big buffalo.  ..  So I asked him, “You still got that pole?”, he says yeah, so went to Bayou Boutte from the camp, and we got the pole, and that when I…that’s my first experience using a jigger pole to put lines down.  ..  And I don’t remember anybody else usin em until we started usin em, then we came up with the aluminum jigger pole.  We tried steel, which was extra heavy, ..  Then we came with the lil one inch aluminum jigger pole that didn’t have much current drag, and much easier to handle ..  You could put out ten times the line in one day [that] you could trying to use the old pole method.

JD:      I can’t imagine what it would be like to try to drive those poles, compared to a jigger pole…

EJ:      Well, you see, during high water times, when the water would come up in the winter and in the spring, nobody would fish below Myette Pt…south of Myette Pt. along the river edge, nobody would fish down there for that reason, you couldn’t hold poles.  ..  Everybody would come above Charenton where with less current and shallow water where you could do it with smaller poles ..  And uh, we didn’t uh…to begin with, a line that’s on a stob, with a jigger pole, can take twice the trash, ‘cause it’s on the bottom. ..  Trash rolls over.  With a pole, you could put ten pounds of weight to the bridle and enough leafs would get on [the line] and she would just float to the top and you lose everything ..  Everything…you work all day to put a line out and go out the next day you didn’t have nothing left.  ..  And uh, when we started with the jigger pole technique, just like the net fishermen used to use, uh, we started being able to fish lines in three times the current we used to fish in previously. 

JD:      I’ve been told that uh, that prior to the line fishermen acquiring the technique of using a jigger pole and a stob, that net fishermen had been using a stob technique for their nets for a while.

EJ:      Right.  Long as I can remember. 

JD:      So, in some ways it was probably adapting net technique to linefishing. 

EJ:      Yeah, yeah.  It’s just take the cross-using the equipment.  You know, jigger poles as long as I can remember, the net fishermen use em.  And, uh, now most net fishermen use anchors.

JD:      Anchors instead of stobs?

EJ:      Rather than stobs, yeah.  Saves time and labor.  ..  So, uh, it’s just adapting it to what we wanted to do.  And now I’ve got a jigger pole I can hit 27 feet of water with.

JD:      Have you really?  Is it screwed together? 

EJ:      Screwed together.  And I get a 10 foot stob and hit 32 foot of water with it. 

JD:      Where do you fish in water that deep?  With stobs?

EJ:      The edge of the river ..  When the fish are on the edge of that river like, uh, between Myette Pt. and Belleview Point, you got a hole cut out in there that, uh, you can’t, uh, you can’t get to the edge of the channel without that type of pole, ‘less you use an anchor to fish the channel, because it makes your crossings too long. 

JD:      Makes your crossings too long?

EJ:      Umhm.  Instead of having just the channel, you got about four bents of line to contend with in 25 plus feet of water.  ..

JD:      So when you talking about the slope, like this, you actually off the slope to start with.

EJ:      Umhm.  That’s right, you way up there.  ..  With a long pole you can get yourself right to the edge, and it helps keep your line from hanging up under all the, uh, all the roots and stuff that’s sticking off the edge of the bank (the slope of the channel side).

JD:      I was telling Joe, I saw a Corps of Engineers cross section of the Atchafalaya River the other day.  They didn’t have any reason to think that, for any reason, this was interesting to me, but I was fascinated by it.  They showed a, uh, a cross section and they showed what we normally…what we normally know of as this long, uh, slope.   And then [an] accelerated slope, and then a flat bottom in the main channel of the river, and of course the other side does the same thing ., like that.  And, uh, this is where…well, you talking about you can get 27 feet, you can get as close to this point as you possibly can, and most of the times we were probably over here somewhere. 

EJ:      What we call the dropoff.

JD:      Yeah, exactly.  The, thing that fascinated me is, they said the typical cross section shows like this…this is fairly clean, this right here is nothing but a mass . of trees and stumps, and everything sticking out…and this is clean. 

[The profile of the lake and channel below Myette Pt. is what are being discussed.  The lake is about 12 feet deep leading to the edge of the channel, it gradually gets deeper to where the channel “dropoff” is.  This is the steep slope on the side of the channel itself.  The steep slope is where the mass of tree stumps, etc., is.  Lines fished there often get hung up.  The channel itself does not have a lot of stumps in it]

EJ:      It’s not as clean as they like to think it is. .. 

JD:      Compared to this, though…they said the bottom scours itself.

EJ:      Yeah, you…you…your thirty hooks…your pole on the side, this way…you use a heavy, heavy weight, and that’s what gives you your problems.  You…you better off not even having a hook here, even though that’s where most of your fish are gonna be at [along the trashy steep slope], cause nine times out of ten after two or three runs you can’t get your line back up out of the…out of the hangs.

JD:      I understand, that it will hang, even, on both sides.

EJ:      Right. 

JD:      You can’t go back to the other end and run it.

EJ:      Umhm.  And uh, that’s like the drags, when we started using the drags…we never used to use drags.  Once we started learning how to use drags, we can unhang these lines with these drags.  ..  Pull em downstream, or upstream.

JD:      I don’t have a drag on here, I don’t think.  No, I don’t.  So, yeah, so yeah, that’s, uh, the jiggerpole is, uh…and I don’t…do, do line fishermen use that anywhere else that you know of?  Do they know about jiggerpoles in Pierre Part?  The line fishermen?

EJ:      Pierre Part are not people that have a knowledge of fishing the rivers in a strong current.  All backwater fishermen.  They may use jiggerpoles, you know, or something, but I don’t think they use it, uh, to the extent that we fish.  They used to fishing lil bitty ole twine.  When they see our twine they wonder why we fishin with rope, you know?  [laughs] They don’t fish the currents. ..  I had one guy when I went to Blue Point one year “What you do with all of that, that big ole line?”.  I say “ Come on the river, I’ll show you why I use it” [laughs].  “Use that lil stuff you use, first thing it ain’t gone be there when you get there, and if it is it’ll cut your hands to pieces trying to run it” [laughs] ..

JD:      So, I’m open to you talking about anything you want to talk about here.  I’m suggesting we start here because…just because that’s a place, if that’s all right with you.  If not, pick something you’re interested in.

EJ:      No, it doesn’t matter to me, we can go down the list.  What I know about shrimp, you know, uh, pretty well, uh, should pretty well cover, you know.  It’s just fresh water shrimp, we catch by making myrtle bushes, which, with uh…pieces of myrtle wax that we cut and uh…eight or ten good limbs and we tie em together up at the…at the big part of the limb. [someone comes in].  And we soak em in the water for two or three days, let em get water soaked, and the shrimp seem to like it.  They feed on it, they come up into it.  Then we dip em with what we call a shrimpnet, which is like a dip net, about 34, 36 inches across, and go down a consecutive line of 40, 50 up to 100 of em, until you get enough shrimp you need…bait lines with.  And, another way to fish em would be with shrimp traps, built out of ¼ inch hardware cloth.  And it’s noted to where the bigger you build the trap, the more throat area you have, the more effective it is. 

JD:      That’s why y’all build em with those big fans out in front of the trap itself?

EJ:      Umhm.  Right, it’s a guide wall ., you know, the more you can get to hit the guide wall the better it comes into it…just a huge cone-shaped throat that sits into it [the front of the trap] that funnels the…like a huge funnel…funnels em right into the trap, cause the shrimp are traveling against the tides…

JD:      Let me suggest something that we can go to from here.  What season do you fish shrimp in?

EJ:      It used to be…

JD:      What water color, in other words, or what season…?

EJ:      …shrimp work better in your muddy waters.  Now, in deeper waters, fishing the bottom of the river, your shrimp would be more effective, uh, sometimes in kind of a semi-clear water…in deeper waters, ‘cause the sunlight doesn’t reach down there as far into it.  But, uh, in shallow waters it takes…shrimp are about the best, and it’s the fastest bait that you can fish with, as far as fish hitting the shrimp fast.  Cut bait, shad, mullet generally fairly slow compared to shrimp.  Uh, [when the] fish are really biting you can run line back every three or four hours and have fish on em already.

JD:      So, shrimp would be primarily, primarily a muddy water bait? 

EJ:      I would say, my experience with it, that moving water…shrimp will work in waters where just about any other bait will fail . in muddy water.  Other baits will fail because the mud tends to get on the bait and blocks it and builds a film on it and fish won’t touch it after that, hardly.  But shrimp is uh, is fast enough that before any siltation can build on it, uh, a fish will usually get it.

JD:      And what kind of fish usually?  Do they have any preferences that you…in your experience…for shrimp?

EJ:      Shrimp?  Your small fish will tend to hit shrimp, in muddy water. Your bigger fish will work on shrimp in muddy water when your waters are colder, in the wintertime.  And your fish are biting slower, so your bigger fish will hit on shrimp…I mean the shrimp stays on the hook longer. 

JD:      OK.  Do they have a preference for what size shrimp to use to bait with?

EJ:      Up in the Basin, you look for a smaller…a smaller shrimp, I guess, uh, inch and half, two inches long. ..  Out on the coast when you fishing muddy waters on the rivers below Belle Isle and those places, and uh, warmer waters, we look for the biggest shrimp we can get.  ..  It’s just the opposite of what it does in the Basin.

JD:      And in the Basin, if I’m right, the big shrimp will just stay there and rot.

EJ:      Big shrimp will stay on the line.  And on the coast it’s different.  ..  We catch…we catch…what we catch on the coast is not…it’s called shrimp bushes, but it’s not…doesn’t look like a river shrimp.  You know what the long-paw prawns are? . That’s what we…looks like we catch out there.  They get about that long.

JD:      About 3 ½ or 4 inches long? 

EJ:      Real long, and they that big around. 

JD:      Big fat ones, eh?

EJ:      And uh, in the spring, when they movin up on the beaches, when they getting full of eggs, uh, shrimp bushes along that beach will load up on em.  ..  They go big, it’d take us a foot tub to bait 1000 hooks. 

JD:      What?!  And the bigger the shrimp the better? . Do you think it’s the same shrimp?

EJ:      No, I don’t.  ..  Looks different.  Because we can go up into the bayous, all the marsh bayous where they got the…lot of em at one time got the steep banks and we utilize em just like we would the willow roots.  You got this elephant ear grass and the elephant ears grow a long white thin root ., and those small shrimp like we talked about we catch in the Basin under willow roots, is what we find in the bayous.  Then we move out in the Bay, and we find a different shrimp.  ..  In the bushes. 

JD:      Hmm.  It could be a different shrimp.  It sure could.

EJ:      They hit just about the time in the spring when the buster crabs start.  You’ll have two or three busters to the bush out there.

JD:      They’ll stay in…they get in there for protection too, eh?  Son of a gun.  OK.  What about salt water shad? 

EJ:      That is a clear water bait.  Use it when your Basin is falling, uh, and the water is beginning to clear.  When your shrimp won’t hold [on the hooks] anymore, when your smaller fish, uh, small eel cats and small blue cats will just tear the shrimp off the hook in two or three minutes.

JD:      In the summer, right?

EJ:      In the summer, late, late spring, early summer.  ..  Sometimes, it depends on the river, it’s just the stage of the river, what the river does?  ..  If the river falls fast you get clear water early, if the river stays up longer, well it kind of delays everything, but uh, you start looking for shad along when the water starts to clear and the shrimp don’t hold any more.  And you’ll catch a nicer fish with your shad, than you would with the shrimp.

JD:      Now, you talking about baiting em whole? 

EJ:      Uh, if you found em small enough, you bait em whole, or sometime we just cut the tip of the tail off – to where the fish can’t grab the tip of the tail and yank it off the hook ..  Your catch ratio is better by cutting the tip of the tail off.  .. 

JD:      And, and the same fish…same fish will be biting the salt water shad as the shrimp, most of the time? 

EJ:      Yes, your lil uh…what we call lil potbelly white bluecats, you know, that’s pretty much the same fish.  As your water clears up, uh, your smaller fish will quit jumpin on the shrimp and go to peeling the shads off fast as you put em on.  So you gotta go lookin for a harder bait even.

JD:      So that brings us into black eel. 

EJ:      Black eel, which is…we use mostly, uh, when we lookin for big fish.  And we used to have big fish sales, years ago.  We used to fish local fish, you’d put out a crossin and bait it with black eel…or, like at the end of the week…you fish Monday through Friday, Saturday, whatever…you want to take a day or two off, you would, uh, spot bait some black eel…

JD:      Spot bait?  Like every so often?

EJ:      Every other ten hooks you have a shad, then you drop a piece of eel on it ..   And uh, that black eel, after 24 hours or so it begins to sour ., and your shrimp like it.  So your shrimp would be gathering on that bait, and, and you’d have your big fish [would] hit these live shrimp. .. 

JD:      Now, was that always the case, you would use the…you would use the black eel as bait for shrimp, [and them] as bait for fish? 

EJ:      Well, we would say it was bait for fish but nine times out of ten that’s what it would…what would be happening.  Now the coast, when we fish the bayous on the coast back of Belle Isle, before all the hoop nets moved in start fishing the big nets in the bayou, you had plenty fish in [those] bayous.  ..  And, uh, we’d bait whole lines with em, go back in the morning have eight or ten head of fish that weighed 200 pounds.  ..  My first year down there was unreal, Jim. ..  I had seven crossins, I go down in the morning have 200, 250 pounds. ..  Run to Calumet Cut and bait my lines with the shrimp, for 24 hours, get back to the camp about  two or three o’clock, go back in the bayou, rerun those lines again with 100, 150 pounds on em.   ..  Crossins no more than 40 hooks. ., 45 hooks.  It was fun to fish.

JD:      That’s not local fish though, I mean, that had to be movin fish. 

EJ:      Well, you…you had a tidal action in these bayous.  Your tide would actually run up, so to a certain extent they were local, your first run would always be better…but with the tidal movement in both directions, your, uh, your fish would kind of move around, they wouldn’t stay in one place all the time like they do in the river.  ..  So you did get a certain amount of fishing…and, you would have schools of fish, would migrate out of the bays into these bayous, and you could tell.  Your lower crossings would do good today, the next day your upper crossings…so these fish would be traveling up and down these bayous.

JD:      And you were baiting that with black eel?

EJ:      Black eel and shrimp, we would use in there. ..  And we also would use shrimp traps in the lil ditches and catch what we would call the lil lush, uh, there’s another name for em, the lil green minnow-types, uh, we call em lush.

JD:      Lil fish?

EJ:      Yeah…

Continued on Chapter 26