Atchafalaya Basin People: Chapter 26

Continued from Chapter 25

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

CONTINUING TO TALK TO E J DAIGLE AT HIS HOUSE.  TALKING ABOUT SMALL BAITFISH CALLED “LUSH”.

EJ       …[laughs] but those fish at certain times of the year, when they spawn, they real colorful. ..  Real pretty.

JD:      Oh, yeah!  The common name for em is pupfish.

EJ:      Pupfish?  ..  Southwest Pass when a norther start, you ought to see that!  I’m talking about this big around!  ..  Humongous.

JD:      Big sailfin sometime on their backs? .. 

EJ:      Pretty fish.  …big head, big wide mouth…evidently they’re aggressive.  [laughs].

JD:      How about mullet? 

EJ:      Mullet is also a clear water bait [that] we used to use in the rivers when we fishing crossins mostly.  Once your fish would fall off your flats into your deep water.  And you would, uh…

JD:      Rivers, what rivers you talking about? 

EJ:      Well, the Atchafalaya River.

JD:      OK. 

EJ:      And, uh, I guess it would work basically in any river you would fish that would have deeper waters.  Cause your fish will leave the flats and fall into deeper water.  And my reasoning is, the reason the fish leave the flats and fall into deeper water is because when the rivers clear up, your shrimp will also bottom down in your deeper water.

JD:      They do?

EJ:      They do.  Your fish…you can find some places in clear water, especially when it’s cooler, you drop your shrimp dips down 15, 20 feet and raise em real slow, you find shrimp there when you can’t find any near the top. ..  And you raise…you talk to hoop net fishermen, they’ll be raising hoop nets and the big shrimp will just be raining off their nets.  So, um, evidentially the fish follow the feed.  ..  And, uh, they down on the bottom but you also got small shrimp too.  Humongous schools…small fish, I mean…and uh, they’ll clean your lines off with shrimp so you have to resort back to mullet or another hard bait.  And your live mullet are used when you also…your small live mullet, two or three inches, four inches long…when you looking for big fish also. 

JD:      I never saw y’all fish with live mullet in the Basin.

EJ:      Well, those years you remember we had a lot of high waters.  We had very little low waters ..  And the rivers never cleared up that much. ..  If you remember the years you fished with us. ..  And uh, that’s the difference. ..  You just have to develop your techniques to whatever is there at the time. ..  Or you use whatever works, put it that way.

JD:      That’s right.  That’s how all this came about.  OK.  Let’s talk about white eel, if you will.  Uh, where they come from, how y’all know that they were there, what you…when you look for em?  Basically, uh, what’s the story on white eel?

EJ:      We…we have no knowledge of where they come from.  Um.  All we know is they’re there and every winter you find these clear dead water lakes with soft mud bottoms, and uh, when you get a big north wind that rakes the bottoms – big waves, you know, rake the bottom, muddy the water.  The eels will come out of the mud and they’ll just start traveling south with the tide that’s created by the strong north winds.  And uh, they’ll come up…they’ll travel on top the water for ten or fifteen feet, and they’ll go down and pop right back up again.  Uh, they’ll uh, they won’t just come up and swim continuously. It’s an up and down thing.  You’ll see one pop down in front of you, watch back your boat he’ll pop back up again behind your boat lot of times, and uh, some times they’re real…some years they’re real plentiful.  The past years, they haven’t been plentiful.  The last plentiful year we had, I think, was uh…I sold the boat in 19…the winter of ’86, I think it is.  Uh, when the norther first started, I’d go to Lake Fausse Pointe and uh, I would dip as much as uh…as 1500 in an hour or two.  2000, and could have continuously kept dipping.  It’s rated as the number one bait at that particular time of year, when nothing else will hit your hooks, you can put, uh, white eels which you cut into lil quarter inch to half inch sections.  Roll em in cornmeal first in order to be able to hold em when you cut em cause they’re slimy.  And uh, cut em in very little pieces and hook im on the thin edge of the skin so that uh, when you come to take the old bait off you can rip it off.  If you hook it all the way thru from one end of the skin to the other, there is no ripping it off.  You have to push the barb backwards through it to get it off.  It’s a slower baiting technique than anything else you can use, but it…you find in the line that you’re fishing with any other cut baits in the Fall of the year…where you might be catching ten, 12 head of fish on a line…your first run on white eel, you may…you may be good for 100 head.  ..  And, uh, fishing local fish it’s really effective at that time of the year.   You can use it as, for local fish, uh, to the point to where one run [then you have] to pick up and move, cause you’ve caught everything there.  ..  And one reason that you catch…the thing on the eel that the fish really want is the slime, cause you can take eel and let it dry and lose the slime, and uh, it won’t be effective.  You’ll catch a few but it won’t be near as effective. 

JD:      Is that what I hear people talking about…about some people freeze em, and some people don’t and…?

EJ:      The frozen eels, if you freeze em like that, and you defrost em, the slime tends to ball off…ball up and fall off ..  I have dried em, and froze em ..  And uh, you put em to soak in warm water before you’re ready to cut em up…and it’ll…it’ll swell back up and still retain some of the slime ..  It’s not as effective as fresh eel, but it’s still more effective than any…any conventional bait you use at the time.  And I have used em at times in muddy water.  I was fishing down at Calumet, the last year I fished, as a matter of fact, and I had lines in water this deep…

JD:      Six inches deep.

EJ:      Six inches deep.  My bateau would drag bottom, with the motor up. ..  And, uh, the tide be low…I have to take my net and a tub and walk out there to take the fish off the line ..  Hard sandbars out there? .. And, uh, I seen right there where the game warden camps are on the delta area, lil pocket in the back in there, water was real muddy, and that’s when the winter fish will tend to pull up in the shallow waters.  I guess cause the shallow waters are warmer, that’s where most of your feed’s at in the winter.  So, uh, big fish normally, three, four, five, eight, ten pound fish, with eels that were frozen – muddy water, you catch four, five hundred pound of fish.

JD:      Frozen…with frozen eel…

EJ:      Frozen eel.  Dry em, and then freeze em. 

JD:      Uh, people still try to keep em alive?

EJ:      They…they…they keep alive real well.  Uh, and eel is something you can put in any old boat you got, or tub, or anywhere where you don’t have to stack em too thick.  You just put water lilies in em with a inch or two of water in em and give em a place to get into the lilies and, and uh, you can…I’ve kept, uh, 2000 as long as two weeks.  ..  I’ve got that big freezer chest…ice chest, rather, I used to have in my big boat.   Used to use it in my transfer boat down at Belle Isle ..  And you put about this much water in it ., about two inches of water in it, and uh, put my eels in it and just throw water lilies in it and uh, the problem with that is as long as it’s cold they’ll keep well, ., but when it gets hot you tend to lose em…lack of oxygen in the water, so, a cure for that was I would take a…get me a bucket of ice ., and just set right in the middle.  . And let the ice defrost slowly…melt slowly . and I guess it would radiate enough coolness in the water to where your eels would keep…stay alive.  ..  But uh, I always thought of getting, you know, aerators and stuff ..  I’m sure that would work real well.

JD:      Now, you talking about  using white eel…in any circumstances out there in the lake?  I mean fishin…cause when that water’s low like that, a lot of times the water’s clear and the channel…the channel is low…you fish white eel both in the lake and across the channel, in crossings?

EJ:      Yes.  Uh, white eel, your fish in the summertime…late fall…will go local, and they won’t move.  But they’ll move for this eel.  You know, it’s like a vacuum cleaner [to] run the line ..  You [can] come back and bait with other baits and not catch a thing after that. It will take a week or ten days before you start [catching fish again].

JD:      Does it really?  Well, what do you have to do, move your line or…?

EJ:      Well.  When you fishing white eel, what I used to do, the last year I fished em I was fishing something like eight or nine crossings in the river ..  What I would do, I would move three a day ..  Three a day, and uh, when the river’s that low…the river was dead low to where [when] normally the current…takes about 190 hooks to cross, ., and the river was so low that, uh, a crossing took 130 ..  You could pull the line tighter.  And we were fishing with long [?] lines.  And, uh, when it’s that low it’s nothing to run one out without the current…the current pressures, current pressures. on you that’s it’s so bad that it makes it difficult to fish.  But when the river gets down like this year, it’s not bad to fish. 

JD:      Interesting.  I hadn’t heard that statistic.  190 hooks under normal low water to cross…

EJ:      Umhm.  When the river…from uh…I fished the river at six feet, at Butte La Rose, and you need a full complement of 190 to 210 hooks to hold a crossing.  ..  And uh, that’s with a heavy two and three pound weight every ten hooks.  ....to maintain em on the bottom…which…backbreaking work like that.  But, uh, [unintelligible] …one of the years where there was no current, you know, you couldn’t…you could run lines in a hurry.

JD:      I remember I was pulling up next to you and you said I could hang on because there wasn’t any pressure on the boat, I remember that.

EJ:      And uh, that was one of the worst years I had on the coast, cause the water got so low the fish just moved up the river.   The sharks moved in uh, into the coast, the blue cats moved up, and after that they never stopped…they just…

JD:      Back on.  I think we’re talking about crawfish now, as bait…

EJ:      As bait? ..  Crawfish as bait is used in, in just about the times when spring is converting to early summer.   Uh, where your water temperatures are starting to rise from your winter lows.  And, lot of times…mostly uh, mixed waters.  In the real strong current in muddy water, well they just rather…your shrimp are still more effective.  But when your shrimp get to where…the waters are warming and you’re catching a little smaller fish, you can put crawfish on and you’ll catch a…catch a nicer run of fish.  It holds better and, at that time of the year your fish are…are hitting crawfish just about everywhere, even your bass and stuff in the woods.  When you see them [sportfishermen?] start going, uh, using crawfish colored crankbaits and stuff, you can pretty well start using crawfish on your lines, and uh, stuff that way. 

JD:      What size crawfish? 

EJ:      You want your smaller crawfish.  Two inches long, is about the most I like.  You get to your bigger ones, well you break the tips of the heads off in order that the crawfish is not too big for the hook. ..  And if the crawfish is too big for the hook, your fish can just grab the head and he’s gone with the head and, you lost the fish and half your bait [laughs]. 

JD:      How do you bait the crawfish?

EJ:      Crawfish, what we call, we string em…the term we use.  You go in underneath the tail and come out just about where the mouth is, between the claws.  ..  And try to get the whole barb of the hook out of the crawfish.  .. 

JD:      Freshwater shad. 

EJ:      Freshwater shad is, uh, what I would call a bait of circumstances.  Um, in muddy water I seen it pay off.  ..  For the simple reason, same thing like the eel does.  Your shrimp will gather on it. ..  And the fish…nicer fish will hit these clusters of shrimp.  Because shrimp can also…also use…a technique we use [with shrimp] I didn’t mention, is uh, we don’t use it much today because we can’t sell big fish, but uh, when everyone was looking for big fish, cause when you caught a big one you made a days work ., you would uh, what they call bunch up live shrimp.  Take your bigger shrimp alive and just hook as many of em on a hook as you can to where you’re not killin em. 

JD:      Like where?  Through the tail?

EJ:      Like through the tip of the tail, the top of the tail right through the shell, or through the top of the head shell, to where you’re not injuring the shrimp [enough] to kill him.  Just jam as many as you can, and you call that live goujon bait.  ..  Umhm, big goujons like live shrimp ., and the fishermen used to go along…that’s what they used to do when your big goujons were prevalent, uh, now we throw big shrimp away, use the small ones. ..  But those days they used to just take the big shrimp and…when you accumulate enough of em on top your pan [whatever the bait shrimp were kept in] you would just live hook em, four or five to the hook ..  And every now and then you would do that and it would, uh, catch a big fish every now and then. .. 

JD:      So, but, you said that you’ve seen freshwater shad work in dirty water, but it’s primarily a clear water…

EJ:      A clear water bait, a hard bait that uh, when your other baits won’t hold and your smaller fish strike at it they can’t knock it off the hook, allowing it to be there longer till a bigger fish comes along, takes a bite of it. 

JD:      We talking about cut, or whole, shad?

EJ:      Well, you…we used to use whole fresh water shad, as big as six, eight inches long, live. .. 

JD:      How’d you keep em alive in your boat, long enough to do that?

EJ:      Uh, you’d go dip em in your wellbox…

JD:      And you’d have a wellbox full of water…

EJ:      And we used to have to go at night, and uh, it was used mostly for local fish.  You’d go move four or five…you’d go mostly before dark and move four or five lines, bents of line, in the stumps…which is about 100 hooks, and uh, go that night, dip your live shad, put water in the wellbox, run straight to your line, hook em on the line crossways the back, and just let em swim around.  And uh, next morning you’d go run em, and, and, . have four, five, six head of 15 to 40 pound fish. ..  So uh…

JD:      Both blue and, and goujon? 

EJ:      Blue and goujons. Goujons more prevalent in your stumps, but you could get a lot of blue cats also.  And uh, it…it’s a bait used a lot in…in salt…in your saltier water areas, cut…like when you fish the coast, and stuff like that.

JD:      Cut shad?

EJ:      Cut shad, is…is better in any of those areas. 

JD:      Then you used to use perch.

EJ:      Perch.  Perch in my experience, unless you were fishing for [with] live bait…or if it was a small perch, inch and a half, that you could string on when the lil blue cats are biting, and the water’s kind of mixed like it was settling out from muddy water, your pressure’s are falling off the river and your water’s starting to settle, these lil string perch would…

JD:      By string, you mean like, uh…thru and then thru again?

EJ:      Sideways thru the eye, coming out at the tail.  ..  And uh, it’s effective on the smaller blue cats.  Cut perch, very seldom have ever caught fish on cut perch.  For some reason it’s just not a bait that really works.  It’s not effective, as compared to other cut baits.  ..  Now live, goes back again to when you could fish bigger fish .. 

JD:      Sure, but that…I do need to go back . into the historical things. 

EJ:      Umhm.  Your lil…your lil black goggle eyes were the best. ..  Were the best, comin out of clear, clear water.  Small, whitish colored perch not near as effective.  ..  Sac-a-lait, useless except to eat [laughs], as a bait. ..  Never could catch anything on em.

JD:      But those lil bluegills and punkinseeds and things, you’d catch things on them?

EJ:      Yeah, strung.  If they were small enough to string, uh, you’d string em on your hook and your lil blue cats would love it. 

JD:      Now, the goggle eyes, they got after the big fish? 

EJ:      That was your big fish bait, if you fish your lil goggle eyes, lil black ones about four inches long. ..  Goujons love em!  ..

JD:      That makes sense because there’s goggle eyes… usually you like to catch em around stumps when you’re fishing for em…goujons there too.  Interesting.

EJ:      Cause you see, years ago you didn’t have the separation from sandy areas and stumpy areas like you got now.  It was all stumpy areas all the way around the entire Basin, you didn’t have the sand in the middle.  And that’s where the feed and the fishes were hanging out [in the stumps].  ..  So uh, that’s what was worked.  Now, you see my Daddy, uh, was one of the first fishermen to come to Myette Pt. and start fishing. .. 

JD:      Oh, really?  From…from where?  Blue Point? ..  Come across the lake and…?

EJ:      Come across the lake.  And he moved the campboat here, fishing, by his lonesome…here.  And then moved back [to Blue Point], and then came back.  He made…my Daddy, before Leroy was born, when Momma was pregnant for Leroy, Daddy said he made big money at ten cents a pound ..  Those big blue cats in that current off of Myette Pt. were uh…the current [was] so strong they were fishing wire line.  ..  Swivel wire?  That 16 gauge galvanized wire Momma used to make swivels with?  ..  And that’s what they would fish as a main line.  Cotton line couldn’t hold. 

JD:      You kidding me?  They really did?

EJ:      All them big 4/0 limericks they used to use in those days.

JD:      4/0 limerick hooks?

EJ:      Umhm.  They would, uh…blue cats…such big fish, and the current was so strong, if you didn’t dip him when he came to the top all he had to do was curl his tail in the current, ., the current would just straighten the hook up.  They used to use those, uh, black yellow tags…

JD:      What’s that?

EJ:      It’s a black hook.  It was the sharpest hook on the market in those days, but it’s livelihood didn’t last very long.  They would rust off right away ..  But it was the most efficient, deadly hook they had in those days.

JD:      Black, yellow tags, they called em.  Big hooks too.  4/0, you said…

EJ:      4/0s and sixes. [6/0].  You know, big fish.

JD:      Now, when you talking about your Daddy coming across the lake to fish over here at Myette Pt., he came over and fished, uh, what we would call bentlines? Now, . with poles, mallet driven poles?   And they would drive, like how many?…how much line you think?

EJ:      I don’t know how much they would fish, but they would mostly maintain along the banks, you know….

JD:      Along the current?

EJ:      No, what I’m saying is, uh, three or four bentlines stretch you know, without big long stretches out in the current ..  But, uh, I remember Mr. Pete Gondolfo used to tell me, uh, before uh, they had nylon, and they had cotton nets that,uh…the fish used to come around Myettte Pt. in that bunch of cypress trees, but that bunch of cypress used to be two times bigger than now.

JD:      That’s those few cypresses that used to be out around the end of Myon’s Canal?

EJ:      There used to be a big, big clump there.   And, uh, they’d fish hoop nets there, and, uh, no way that they could raise em.  They’d lift em to the top of the water and cut em open to get the buffalo and the catfish out. ..  And, uh, the nets, after fishing three or four weeks, the fish would just tear em to pieces…they were cotton, and couldn’t last.  They say fish was unreal. 

JD:      Now those were the days you could see across the lake, I mean, all the way across?

EJ:      Yeah, no sandbars.  I can remember…far back as I can remember, uh, when we moved back to Myette Pt., and I can start remembering geography, . the sandbars were just even with Goat Island, the bottom end of Goat Island…which Goat Island was only half as big as it is now. 

JD:      The bottom end of Goat Island, you saying, so you…so at that point you could not see across the lake from Myette Pt. then?

EJ:      Not as I can remember.  This was, I guess, in ’52, something like that.

JD:      But if you got below Goat Island you still had the full lake width?

EJ:      You could look…you could look across and see what we call Thibodeaux Chute in them days.  It was just two lil hills, with a chute going through it.  And you could see the low bars in the lake.   You could still see over em, lil short willows growing up on em ..  And uh, from there to 1960 it just blossomed unreal kinda. 

JD:      But if you know if you have any memory of uh…Let me ask you this.  I’m trying to get a picture in my head of what the lake would have been like when the bars were still…?  In the ‘30s, in the…in the ‘40s, before the lake really started to silt up.  I wonder what was Grand Lake like in terms of…we know how wide it was…. What I’m wondering about is…was there a channel in the middle of it…that the…was there a main channel then, even…?

EJ:      They had a…they had a, a…

JD:      A deep spot?

EJ:      I guess you could call it a deep spot, that the boats used to use, but they were always running aground.  I remember as a kid, tugboats stuck for days and days and days…before they dug the channel, I think in uh, 1957 or ’58, in that neighborhood, they started redigging that channel where the made it deep as it is now ., and prior to that you had uh, you could sit there and listen to these big river boats just grindin away trying to get their tows unstuck ., right there at Goat Island, you know? ..  And uh, like what you’re talking about, uh, those years I guess you could sit right there at Myette Pt. [and] look straight across to Hog Island.  ..  Kind of northeast ..  To Hog Island, all the way across.  ..  And you could look to your left, and you could see, uh what they call uh, Chicken Island going up above Charenton.  Which is a good ways above Charenton, another eight miles north of Charenton.  And you had Shaw’s Island, Chicken Island…

JD:      All right, let me do this.  Let me show you why I’m asking.  Uh, I’m just trying to get clear in my head, what was it like when you could get all the way across?  Was it…was the lake a deep lake, like ten feet deep ., from Blue Point to Myette Pt.?

EJ:      Yes, right.  Yes.

JD:      It was?  . and was there a channel, a natural channel in the middle of it where the main water came down through the middle of the lake?

EJ:      Well, you see, what you gotta remember is there was no main water, prior to the Basin [levees]. The lake had one, one continuous depth . all the way around, pretty much. And the boats, those days, we didn’t have the big boats…tugboats and stuff you got now…so whatever they had, had a minute amount of barge traffic.  ‘Cause you see, I can remember uh, living on Bayou Boutte and having barge traffic…barge traffic going up Bayou Boutte.  ..  Instead of going up Six Mile Lake and finding shallow water, [they would] hit the deeper bayous.  They come up from Morgan City, hit  [?] Pass, American Pass, come up through Bayou Boutte and then shoot on up north.

JD:      So, there was shallow water in those lakes then, though?

EJ:      Well it, it…I say shallow, uh, six, seven, eight feet ..  Uh, barge traffic and all, you know, took…takes more water than that ..  I remember Daddy saying the lake straight across to Blue Point was…was pretty much one continuous depth, at one time.

JD:      And was that shallow enough to drive poles with a mallet?  To fish all the way across?

EJ:      Umhm.

JD:      You could? 

EJ:      You could have put lines all the way across.  You could have.

JD:      OK, that’s…that’s what I was wondering about.  Before we leave this, can you tell me what you know about the way they used to fish with soap?

EJ:      Soap?  Best soap to use was P&G. That’s a white soap that uh, when…when you put a hook through it, it was pliable enough that it didn’t split, or crumble or break up.  ..  P&G…and it was used in clear water, when the fish would go local.  Clear water days, that you bait with soap.  Also, some Octagon soaps would work. 

JD:      And how would you prepare it to fish with it? 

EJ:      You cut it in lil cubes, and uh, bait your lines with it.  It, it was a technique though that you had to sell your fish right away, . because once your fish bit on the soap and swallowed it, they wouldn’t do so well in the fish car [laughs].  I guess the gas would bubble em up, or whatever.   So uh, but I have used some soaps in my earlier days. 

JD:      You did use soap?  And you did catch fish on soap?

EJ:      Umhm.  I never had no real luck with it [laughs], course in those days I was just beginning…my fishing techniques, and my resolve then were not as good as they developed to be. 

JD:      Well, I want to…I want to ask you, when I come back and talk to you some more…I want to ask you about your early days at fishing.  Uh, you know, how you got started as a young boy…how Russell got started, when he was there, going with your daddy or whatever it was you did.  Talked to Joe about it this morning, it was really neat, kind of predictable, where…where the kid was, man, living to go out there with Daddy in that boat, and…and then living for those first few days when Daddy gave him three bents of line to use…just for his own ., and then living for that day when he could go and set a lil bit of line and run it all for himself?  I mean, was that the same sort of thing?  Does that kind of happen with you too? 

JD…over again because it might be that you can pick up some stuff here.  The reason I think this is…this book…have you ever seen this book before?

EJ:      Uhuh.

JD:      This was a master’s degree…(there is nothing on the front), it was written by Malcolm Comeaux.  Uh, it’s a master’s degree that he wrote called “Atchafalaya Swamp Life, Settlement and Folk Occupations”, and he’s got a LOT of good stuff in here.  Although it doesn’t cover what we’re talking about in the detail that we’re . that we’re talking about.  It was written in 1972 so it’s not terribly, terribly old.  But uh, one of the things that’s fascinating about it is he…he uses a base map in here that was based on a map used by this guy Abbot in 1863.  So it’s that Civil War age map we were talking about before ..

EJ:      What I’ve got is bigger detail..  But it’s hard to read ‘cause it’s been recopied so many times, it’s off the original. 

JD:      I sure would like to see that.

EJ:      I got it in the room here.

JD:      OK.  Here’s the thing I wanted to show you about how, how fascinating this was to me.  Talking to Myon and Agnes about where the old people were buried…they kept telling me, what Joe was talking about outside?  .  They kept telling me the Canal, they were buried at the Canal.  I said, “Well what canal?  What canal is it?”.  And Myon says, “Well, it really wasn’t a canal, there wasn’t any water there”.  And he said “I don’t know why it was called a canal, but that’s what it was”.  So I was left with that.  So, I went back to work and started lookin at some various maps of where he was talking about, and he was talking about a place that starts on Lake Verret and ends up in Napoleonville.  And somewhere along the end of that was a canal, and a restaurant and a dancehall.  No water.  I go back and I look and see, I said “The only thing that goes from Lake Verret to Napoleonville is what they now call Highway 401”.  And there is no canal there but it’s a highway, and by God, on the map halfway between Lake Verret and Napoleonville is a little settlement they call Attakapas Canal, in the middle of nowhere.  There’s no water there.  But they still call it a canal.  So I’m thinking at some point in time…., something was there that had water in it.  So I took that uh, I took that map and I took…and when I found this map I started looking at it.  If you look at this map, and what this of course indicates from hearing…from the thing [Comeaux book) is, these are the routes that people took to go from east, in these days, in 1863, to everything that was west, and of course the Basin was a natural barrier just like a mountain range . you had to cross.  You had to get in it through the passes, and so on, to get there ..  The only two ways to get in it was one here at Bayou Plaquemine, which of course was the seat of the town of Plaquemine, and I know that the reason Plaquemine was there was because of the bayou and the river traffic from the Mississippi to the Basin.  well, that’s one.  The other one was this little thing right here, with the town of Napoleonville right there.  Now, in 1863 they show this [canal] as water.  I went back and compared it to that highway 401, and it’s exactly the same, curve for curve. 

EJ:      Bayou followed it, eh?  Or it followed the bayou.

JD:      Bayou’s gone.   The roads still there, the lake [canal] is still goin, I mean is gone.  And it went from a waterway, which was one of the two primary ways you got into the Basin, in 1863, to no waterway at all…just a highway.  It’s amazing to me, to be able to make those kind of connections.  But anyway, this is where Agnes and Ida would go dancing.  Right at the tip of this…what in those days was still a dirt road, right there.  There was a restaurant and a dance hall, right on that tip. 

EJ:      That’s not where they got Shell Beach is today? 

JD:      Uh, there probably is shell beaches in there. 

EJ:      Cause, they got what they call Shell Beach.  It’s back here, you know where we went spend the night [when] we took the surveys? [fisherman’s co-op surveys].

JD:      Yeah.  It was back in there, sure was.  I never made that connection.  Could be.  But anyway, this is where Myon’s people were from, Fourmile Bayou.  Right here, and uh, and Agnes and Ida and them lived right here.  There was a uh, there was a canal there with what they call a skidder camp, right there? And they used to paddle a pirogue from here across to here, to uh, to go to these dances. ..  That’s where we want to go Thursday [trip is planned to go to the graves if they can be found].  Want to come around here and drive down this road and see if we can find the settlement [Attakapas Canal], and the old church and cemetery is about right there.  [referring to a state map now]

 EJ:      Cause you see, my family owns a lot of property…well, they did own a lot of property right back of Fourmile Bayou ..  Right in here, uh, I went there this past year uh, I [had] never been down Fourmile Bayou, where Daddy was from, so I went over there and that’s where T-Man Bailey has a store…has a store there.

 JD:      Still has a store there? ..  Myon’s, uh, kin people? .. 

 EJ:      Umhm, yeah, umhm.  And you go through Stephensville and you drive and you follow…your pavement ends…and you got about six, seven miles of shell road and you come out right on Fourmile Bayou.  He’s got a store and gas pump, and got a brick home right there.  He built him a brick home there hauling stuff in on barges. ..  Cement trucks and all, on barges, there.  .  And uh, yeah, he’s cleaning…trying to clean a lot of property don’t belong…still belongs to the family ..  So, uh, my cousin Byron [Daigle], you knew him ., Byron just got his settlement and uh, he fixing to hire a surveyor.  Survey all that property …

 JD:       Byron got his settlement?

 EJ:      Yeah.

 JD:      Did he do good?

 EJ:      Little over a million, I believe.  He had been pushing for 2.3 if it went to court.  And they settled for around half of that I believe.  ..  Well, his lawyer got 30%.  You know how that goes.  ..  But, uh, he still…well, he’s still in the air about, he said, the moneys…they coming from different factions.  The clutch people, the engine people, the turbo people…so he say the money are comin together and they’ve got to pay a mechanic something like $50,000 for his testimony.  What caused the whole thing is was the mechanics put a bearing in backwards in the clutch ..  Instead of the oil squirting onto the bearing, it broke a line and it was squirting it on the turbocharger which was red hot, causing the fire.

 JD:      Ummm.  That where the fire was?

 EJ:      So, when they proved that, and uh, he said he shouldn’t went ahead and took it but he’s tired fighting it all those years, so he…

 JD:      Well, ¾ of a million will probably help him…

 EJ:      Well, like he says, his lifestyle, what he used to live…live on whatever interest he get off of that and try invest a lil of it to bring him something back.

 JD:      Does he get some sort of continued medical treatment…?

 EJ:      I would think he did.  He didn’t go into details…he didn’t go into detail.  I told him, “What you got gone haunt you forever”.  You know?  .. 

 JD:      So anyway, uh, this was interesting to see this, right here, and to see that Plaquemine was formed here, Napoleonville was formed there.   There’s not a bit of a reason for Napoleonville to be there anymore, once the canal was gone.

 EJ:      No.  But see, where Fourmile Bayou comes into Magazille [Bayou], there’s another bayou called the Magazille here, comes around. And that’s where the part of the property my grandfather daddy had – Sead Daigre.

 JD:      Sead.  I have him on there [genealogy chart]. 

 EJ:      And, uh, he owned all kinds of property back here.  And he sold some it through time, he lost some of it for taxes, his wife was schoolteacher…she went back and recovered it, and the state’s got some of the property right now for taxes that needs to be recovered. And that’s what Byron wants to look into. ..  Because they had one old aunt livin, she had power of attorney over it all in Tampa, Florida.  And I don’t know how, but Uncle Ike and Huey been trying for years to get that power of attorney from that old lady.  She never would give it to em, but somehow Byron got it.   And he’s got it, I saw it.  Notarized in writing.  ..  Notarized in writing.  Matter of fact last year I paid the taxes on the property we got.  There’s 200 acres on there, that is cleared.  The title’s cleared, and uh, I paid $270 something dollars worth of taxes last year on it.   And I’ve got aunts…I’ve got aunts that’s worth 10 million dollars and she won’t…you know…at least try to keep it in the family, you know?  ..  But there’s another, uh, I don’t remember Byron said two…two…or 400 more acres that the state has taken for taxes that needs to be reclaimed.  ..  Byron’s attorney knows a lot about this and properties that T-Man [Bailey] has taken, cause his family uh, got land in here too, and T-Man was grabbin some of their land.  What he do is putting camps on and selling leases on em for years.  ..  For 30, 40 years he’s been collecting leases.  And he didn’t like it, what he did, he went over to the property records that uh, at the courthouse in St. Martinville.  He went look in the books and you could see where he cut the title fee page out.  It shows no transaction.  .. And that’s how he’s claiming the property he’s got ..  Always got one in the bunch.

 JD:      How is that kin to Myon?  T-Man? 

 EJ:      First cousin, I believe. When I went there last year…see, talk to T-Man…he kind of fish…give me the fish eye…figured…what I was after, you know, cause he…he hated Ike.  Cause Ike was…was…pretty much hair strung, you know, he would tell T-Man just like it was and T-Man didn’t like it.  They went on up there one day…to do some…upper canal there, that was the boundary and T-Man come there and [wanted to] run em out the canal.  He [Ike] say he “Had the papers, you want to see em?”.  [laughs] and T-Man didn’t like that at all.  But Byron is fixin to get a survey in there, and uh, survey some of that property.  ..

 JD:      So anyway, when you look at this right here [looking at the 1863 Abbot map], now don’t forget this is 1863, so uh, this does show however what the lake looked like before there was any filling. in on it.  And this is what you were talking about…about looking from uh, from Blue Point…

 EJ:      This is Cypress Island Pass…

 JD:      Cypress Island Pass, yeah, so this would be Myette Pt. right here…

 EJ:      This would be Belleview, this would be Myette Pt. 

 JD:      And that’s Charenton…

 EJ:      Charenton, Grand Avoille Cove, coming into Lake Fausse Pointe. See, coming up in here you…up here you looking at most probably Shaw’s Island or Chicken Island, one or the other right here. 

 JD:      This I believe is Hog Island right here….

 EJ:      Bayou Sorrel, no…Hog Island would be somewhere right in here ., somewhere in that area I believe because it’s just above Bayou Pigeon, and it’s below Bayou Sorrel ., it would be somewhere in that area...

 JD:      And this is what ended up as Catfish Bayou and Bayou Cowan….

 EJ:      That not what it is?  That’s not Lake Murphy?

 JD:      Well, don’t forget, this is 1863, and your main waterbodies below Sorrel are Catfish Bayou, Bayou Cowan and then you get to , uh, Little Pigeon, which is this, and then Big Pigeon is much smaller.  And of course this is before any of the canals. 

 EJ:      Yeah, this is where Williams [Canal] would be,  this is West …coming up Bayou Long…this would be West Fork…Main Fork…and East Fork right here.   And Blue Point Canal.

 JD:      So, this was…was this Blue Point right here? 

 EJ:      No.  ..  That would be right here. 

 JD:      Oh, that’s Blue Point?  Way down below?

 EJ:      See, you got two Blue Points.  This is a Blue Point , and this was a Blue Point.  You had two canals.  I know they had one here, and I guess it [the other one] must have come in later when they started pullin the timber out of there. 

 EJ:      Let me get this big map I got, see what it…see what it looks like. 

 JD:      Yeah, yeah, yeah!

 [unknown voice, EJ’s son?]:           Bayou Teche, I think?

 JD:      Yeah, Bayou Teche was the backside limit of it [the Basin] during high water.  Actually continued from the Mississippi to Bayou Teche, that’s right.  So you a shrimper, huh?

 [UV]:   Well, we try to make a living out of it. 

 JD:      One of them rich fellows! [laughter]

 [UV]:   We try to make a living out of it, put it that a way. 

 [EJ returns with another map.]

 EJ:      See, Major General N. P. Banks, Henry L. Abbot…well didn’t you say Abbot?

 JD:      That’s Abbot, that’s Abbot’s map, yeah…after Abbot 1863.

 EJ:      1863, February. 1863…. this is [more] detail, you see.  This covers all the way down to Mermentau, and uh….

 JD:      Let’s see, this is the Mississippi, right?

 EJ:      It’s hard to read ‘till you start…get you a start…here’s Grand Lake here

 JD:      Find Grand Lake, all right.  ..  Where’s uh, where’s Bayou Lafourche?  Here.  Bayou Lafourche, see, comes off the Mississippi right there.  There’s that road!  Look!  Look!  What’s it called?  What’s it called? 

 EJ:      Right there!  Attakapas Landing.

 [difficulty reading the name of the canal/road on the map that corresponds to Attakapas Canal – later La. Hwy. 401.]

 JD:      You know what though…now that I know this is here, we need to find out where the original is…take a look and see what the name of that thing is…

 EJ:      I can tell you where the original is February 8, 1862…

 [UV]    You mean they did this?   Come on!  They can’t do this in 1862, nowadays they can’t even control the floods. [laughter].

 EJ:      I rest my point.

 JD:      Look at the fragments…look at the fragments of the parchment, It’s all torn ..  I want to copy this.  See, that’s Fourmile Bayou, right there.  I want to get the information off of that. 

 EJ:      Don can’t see a damn thing far, but he’s got x-ray eyes close up.  Let’s see, Lake Verret right here.  I’ll tell you who can tell you, Carl Carline.  He’s the one got this for me.

 [more trying to read the name on the canal/road]

 JD:      Oh, Carl Carline got that for you?  Oh, well then that’s it.  I’ll get it… I’ll get it. I’ll get it from Carl.

 EJ:      You see, here’s Shaw’s Island and Chicken Island up here ., above Charenton here, this ought to be able to tell us uh…all filled in…you see this right here, right now there’s five foot of bank all around all of this, all you got is a river coming down the middle of it.  And you got one chute that comes right on up through here…And all the rest is…is…is banks. 

 JD:      This is the same map, right here.  This is the same map, except what they did was redraw it.  Because it says “After Abbot, 1863”, so they redrew this to make this, but look, here’s what it looks like now, right here.  All of this that you would see…here’s Grand Lake…this is what it was like…all this Grand Lake, all this is gone [silted in].

 EJ:      This is the levee.

 JD:      This is 1969 [another map], so it’s a hundred year difference.  ..  You were trying to see where Hog Island was. 

 EJ:      This is Chicot, one of these got to be Keelboat Pass and this got to be Hog Island right here.

 JD:      I’ll bet you that’s Hog Island right there.  ..  This is Flat Lake, it says.  .. 

 EJ:      See, here’s Attakapas something up here.

 JD:      Attakapas boundary.  Doesn’t that say boundary?  Country, country!

 [UV]    [confused, trying to follow a line on the map]

 JD:      There were territories that they drew in 1863, about where Indian Lands were, and where various things were…yeah…also various governing areas of Louisiana were divided into things like territories,., like the uh…Opelousas was called Attakapas Post, and that was a big civic area.

 EJ:      Yeah, but I mean, it [the map he has] goes way on up, all the northern part of the state. 

 JD:      I’m going to have to stop this tape now.  I’m gone have to go home and leave these guys.

 Fini

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