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Email Story to a Friend July 6, 2006 Pat Wray, of Corvallis, battles a cobia near an oil barrack off the Louisiana coast. (Mark Freeman) Rita, Katrina breathe life into Gulf HOUMA, La. — Over the High Life's gunnel comes a steady stream of red snapper caught almost at will at the base of a bayou oil derrick by three Oregon anglers not used to sweating through an ocean fishing trip. Then two oil workers high atop the derrick call down from their perch like watchmen from a crow's nest. They point to dark shadows swirling on the Gulf of Mexico's surface, and Eric Pellegrin gets excited. "Hold on, ya'll," Pellegrin, the High Life's 21-year-old Cajun skipper. "We're about to have some fun. Who wants to have some fun?" Pellegrin casts a bright-green jig toward one of the shadows. Another swims beneath a bait dangled by Portlander Bill Monroe, and eats it. Within minutes, all three anglers on board are grappling with cobia — a warm-ocean version of a lingcod — at the derrick's base. And for now, everyone has forgotten about all the smaller snapper. Ten months ago, when the infamous hurricanes hit Louisiana, no one would put fun and the bayou in the same sentence with Katrina and Rita. Now, it's the bayou's plentiful fish and excellent sport-fishing that are telling some of the first good-news stories about post-hurricane life in Louisiana's Cajun country. Advertisement Portions of the gulf are experiencing a rapid rebirth in recreational and commercial fishing opportunities thanks to the power, veracity and paths that Katrina and then Rita cut through the gulf. Thirty-foot waves that passed this particular old derrick last August have pumped much-needed oxygen into previously dead near-shore waters, opening huge swaths of the gulf to fish. The result is a summer of 2006 with Bubba Gump-like shrimp hauls and a-fish-a-cast outings for sport anglers warned by charters to bring plenty of coolers and ice for the day's haul. "I kind of hate to say it this way, but the hurricanes were the best things to happen to the fishing here," Pellegrin says. "There's just so many snapper and other fish around here that it's been unbelievable. "Basically, we got the good out of the hurricanes," Pellegrin says. The hurricanes helped shake up what is called the hypoxic zone, an area off the mouth of the Mississippi River that's roughly the size of New Jersey, says Harry Blanchet, the fin-fish program manager for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. Nitrates and other chemicals floating down the Mississippi help create this zone where extremely low levels of dissolved oxygen make them dead zones to fish, Blanchet says. While inland winds and flooding destroyed roughly half Louisiana's 80,000-boat recreational fleet, the ocean surges pumped oxygen into the dead zone areas. When the storms subsided, they left a recharged gulf with more livable and fishable waters for snapper, amberjack, grouper and the bait fish on which they feed, Blanchet says. "This has been an excellent year for fishing, if you managed to have a boat survive the storms," Blanchet says. "Hurricanes really shuffle the deck." And that reshuffling didn't deal Pellegrin the same bad hand experienced elsewhere in Cajun country. Pellegrin lives in Houma and fishes out of Cocadrie, an end-of-the-road bayou marina southwest of New Orleans and roughly halfway between the locations where Katrina and Rita touched land on Aug. 29 and Sept. 24, respectively. Both escaped with less severe winds and floods than fishing villages further east such as Venice and Cameron, where the vast majority of boats were destroyed. "Some of those communities just got shredded," Blanchet says. "The Houma area is doing relatively great, especially for shrimp." Shrimp provide a backdrop for fishing in the bayou now awash in life. Motoring out of Pellegrin's slip at Cocadrie, signs of hurricanes are almost non-existent. Before leaving the bayou, Pellegrin steers his 30-foot aluminum boat toward the "Tracy & Macie," a shrimp boat with a sign saying "Fresh Bait" on the transom and a horde of gulls flocking overhead in search of a loose sardine or a discarded shrimp. Another gull frenzy occurs over nearby shrimp boats, hoping to cull some of their heavy catches despite the 5-foot swells — a rough day by bayou standards. Brown pelicans relax on pilings while two porpoises nudge a newborn on the surface. "They're nosing it up, trying to teach him how to breathe in the water," Pellegrin says. Then Pellegrin points the boat's nose toward the gulf. Another 90-minute mad dash puts Pellegrin and his anglers at a series of oil derricks and signal pilings 30-32 miles offshore. Snapper suspend at varying levels, and it doesn't take long to find them. The three Oregonians, all at an Outdoor Writers Association of America conference at nearby Lake Charles, La., haul specimens of seven gulf species from the 84-degree water. The surface-swirling cobia are the highlight of the trip for Pat Wray, a Corvallis-based outdoor writer. "In terms of being around all those big fish and casting to them on the surface, I've never done anything like this," Wray says. The trio kept 270 pounds of cobia and snapper, happily paying the $500 bill to ice and ship it to salmon country. "Well worth it," Wray says. Cobia and red snapper are delicacies from the gulf, where snapper catches are better now than in recent years, Pellegrin says. "We haven't had the fish numbers, especially in the younger snapper, around here the past three years or so," Pellegrin says. "This year, there's so many snapper out there it's unbelievable." But the good won't be around for long. Blanchet warns that the same conditions that left parts of the bayou unhealthy for fish like snapper and cobia are starting to reform. Stagnant, hypoxic areas are beginning to reform in the gulf as they regularly do each mid-summer. The best that Rita and Katrina brought to the bayou could be old news soon. "Next year probably will be back to normal," Blanchet says. "And people will be fishing in all the same places catching the same types of fish they normally do." Mail Tribune Home | Local News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Life | Opinion AP News | Archives | Site Map | Community | Classified Copyright © 1997-2006 Mail Tribune, Inc. All rights reserved. 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