Vanishing Paradis‪e

Ramsey Russell: I’m your host Ramsey Russell, join me here to listen to those conversations. Welcome back to another great episode of Ducks Season Somewhere. I’m your host “RR” Ramsey Russell. I am back with Warren Coco Go devil motors in Baton Rouge Louisiana. I’ll tell you a story, years ago I met Warren Coco in Washington DC not in Louisiana, and not in a duck blind I met him for the first time in Washington DC. And I had gotten a call from National Wildlife Federation from my buddy Cooksey. And, he said, what’s your opinion on politicians? I said, what are you talking about. He said, man, I want to invite you to come up here and participate in a fly in for the National Wildlife Federation and he explained what it was about. And it had to do with a major waterfowl habitat issue in my world, down in south Louisiana down the mouth of the Mississippi River. And he had invited several folks to come up and to make appointments with their representatives. And then when you went into the meeting with your representative, somebody from National Wildlife Federation came in and we started talking Vanishing Paradise, the big sunken land down to mouth of Mississippi River. And I reference duck hunting and duck habitat because you know that is an incredible commercial and valuable resource beyond waterfowl. But in my world, as far as I’m concerned, it is the crown jewel of the Mississippi fly away, it’s where all the ducks have historically, and the geese have gone too historically over winter. And in that same meeting I met Mr. Jake Letendre, he and I became friends and you all know we film and then travel together. But I met Warren Coco and I told him weeks ago when we started recording a series that at some point in time I wanted to talk to him about Vanishing Paradise. My exposure to that region had been through a good friend of mine, Mr. Jeff Anastacio. And we used to go out the mouth of Venice and it was white knuckle boat ride. Man, this guy was hard core. Jeff thought I was speaking waterfowl [**00:05:27] I don’t know how you did it. Because those folks come out of Venice and it’s 8-10 miles down to the Gulf of Mexico. And they run down in this vast paradise of state and federal and public lands and private lands. And they run down river with pirogue and decoys and everything soaked up. And then you cut off the rear end to another body of water. And at some point time you stop, and you offload the decoys. Then you put the pirogue in the water and you load it up. Everybody steps in your own pirogue and off you go into the Roseau cane. And one thing I can tell you about hunting, that part of world is either going to the blind or coming out. At some point in time that tide going to move, you’re going to have to get out and walk. The first time I ever hunted I was within a pirogue with a guy and he said, son, you’re going to get out and pull this tide is of going out we had to get back this backwater, we’re burning daylight, you can see clouds of ducks another storm and those ducks were just falling out of the water. Well, I jumped out and look if you stop a second, you’re going to sink a foot, you got to run, and you got to pull that boat and go through the marsh and pull it and he was busting out laughing. I’m about to have a heart attack. This old man was laughing. I step back in the boat. He said, what are you doing? I said, well, I guess it’s just a joke. He goes, son, I ain’t joking. If you aren’t got pulling this, we aren’t going nowhere. So I pulled us all the way the open water about had a heart attack, but it was well worth it. And buddy of mine Skip Knowles quoted me one time and one of the earlier waterfowl articles I participated with him in saying, and I still haven’t been in a few years, but I still believe this is probably the truth for anybody looking to shoot canvasback back a really, really nice canvasback. I can hardly think of anywhere better to go than the mouth of the Mississippi River. Problem is there aren’t no guys down there. You got to know somebody, you got to know what you’re doing, you got to get off and navigate through this perilous marsh or you’re just not going to get into them. But I would have said having hunting with Jeff down there during the day that if you weren’t going to shoot but three ducks, canvasback limit was two, pin tail limit was one. And if we weren’t going to shoot three ducks, it was going to be a pair of canvas back and a pin tail. Anyway after hurricane Katrina, Jeff and I were down there fishing and we run across this big, big, we come off the Mississippi River, went through a cup without this big open body of water of bay they called it and I might have been in the middle of Gulf of Mexico I could look 360° and couldn’t dry land. And I’ve been down there fishing with him for like Jeff, where the hell are we? He goes, oh, you know where we are? I said no, I promise you, I don’t know where I’m at right now, I’m lost scooter brawn. I don’t have a clue where we are. And he pointed to his map. We had a bunch of little pins dropped on his computer screen and he started start to slow down and start to slow down. And he finally stopped and said right here, exactly right here on this point is where you and I caught a limit of redfish and speckled trout when that water was falling. Remember we were talking no shrimp and those plastic cocoa minutes [**00:08:35] into the grass, yeah, I go, where did the grass go? About a mile and a half north of us, it’s gone. And they’re losing a football field size of marsh per hour. And that event has been happening for how long Warren, a decade?
Warren Coco: I don’t know the exactly, a long time. And everybody’s got different numbers on how much of losing, some places will gain in most places we’re losing. It just depends on where you go. Mouth of the river is subsiding much faster than anywhere else because it’s the newest formed Delta. I read a book, I had a friend of mine first off all, I had a friend of mine I met through business, bought gold [*00:09:18] in 1978 and he had a camp on private land on pass Alcoa. And I got to know him real well. Actually one of my closest friends and I stayed down there with him. He had a little talk paper shack on the side of the pass bank down there which eventually fall into a real nice camp as the years went by. And sad to say he lost his life, he was working on Rufus camp, fell off Rufus camp, broke his neck got killed right before Katrina. And then Katrina took everything took his camp, everybody else’s camp that was on that location. But he gave me a book to read. It was trapping Muskrats of Louisiana written by Ted O Neill who was a waterfowl biologist for Louisiana department wildlife and fishers. This book well I think it was written in the 50s and it was all about the coast and the subsidence and how the delta was formed, how the river formed everything. And everybody needs to do some research on that, and they kind of research the river and how it was all formed. The Mississippi River where it’s running out right now, it’s running out the mouth of the river below New Orleans. The river used to run out where the Atchafalaya is and it’s moving back and forth several times. Well right now it’s trying to go back down the Atchafalaya because that’s the shortest route to the gulf. What it did, it ran down the Atchafalaya, this was shorter, out to go east and it broke off that point and started going down south east through Baton Rouge and Orleans. And as it grew through thousands of years it kept building sediments, the mud coming down the river would build and it would grow further, would build and grow further. Then it got to where it’s at right now and then it drops off the continental shelf. You go out there in the South pass in six miles you are in a 100 ft. of water. You go out southwest past 10 miles, you are in 300 ft. of water. I mean it just drops off there’s no place for that sediment to build anymore. All through the hundreds of years or thousands of years that’s how it’s been has been that land has been maintained by the river and the sediments are building. But at the same time it was subsiding because the soft sediments start compacting. Okay, everybody can relate to that time and what happens the marsh subsides more mud comes builds on top it keeps sinking, it keeps sinking, it keeps sinking and it keeps building, it keeps building, it keeps building. What has happened through the years the channelization of the river that the core did for commerce and flood control has totally changed the whole college of the all the wetlands on south Louisiana. And that is the biggest factor I see in the destruction and the land loss on the coast of Louisiana. Now I’m at hackberry it is extreme, well it’s almost a Texas. That land was formed much earlier with sediments and it is compacted, and we’re having, they’re claiming subsidence there also. But I can’t see it, I don’t know if it’s measurable but at the mouth of the river the last time I stayed at the wildlife and fisheries camp in 1977 the washroom and the bottom of it had eight ft. ceiling in it. 20 years later I’m down there fishing the ceiling in that washroom was four ft. above the ground. The whole camp was sinking, all the land was sinking it wasn’t just the land, everything was sinking. That’s a natural phenomenon what the sediments do as they’re building their compacting it, steadily compacting it, steadily settling. And there’s a lot of factors of why we’re losing so much land in the coast of Louisiana. One, they all talk about saltwater intrusion to the canals at the oil companies duct, that’s a factor. But to me, the biggest factor is the loss of the freshwater sediments that’s not going into the marsh. Back years ago, Bayou Manchac flowed out of the Mississippi River into the Amy River, into Lake Maureupa, into Lake Pontchartrain and it reduced the solemnity. Bayou Plaquemine flowed to the west side and then all these bayous that flowed on natural bays, natural waterways. Bayou Manchac sailing ships used to come up through that right now it’s a dry ditch, there’s no water flow, the levee cut all that off and it’s just a dry ditch. And Jean Lafitte passed through there years ago down Bayou Manchac. Manchac means back way in Indian if you could be in a Mississippi river and wanted to go to the gulf that was a shortcut. So going out at the end of the mouth of the river, go through Manchac and get out into Lake Pontchartrain. But cutting the river off has done more damage I feel than anything else. And there was my friend Jimmy he had been in there since the 60s, he had met a guy down there, don, there who owned private property down there, and he got hooked up with don and they shot neuters. They didn’t trap, they shot, there was too many neuters to trap, and they would hunt them. And he was telling me a story one day and this was in the refuge on the island. There’s all floating marsh back then before Betsy Camille come took it all. They were walking on the floats shooting neuters. He said as they were walking, deer were getting up ahead of them and when they got to the end of the island deer turned around and came back on and they counted them it was 130 deer on that island that they had pushed to the end and came back on. Right now that island has four ft. of water in it. It’s just a pond now. What happened Betsy Camille came to us all floating marsh like with Yale, The Terrebonne Parish, and Little Morgan city all formed by the river Atchafalaya River there. And what happened, it’s all floating and it’s just like Avoca Island where we picked up alligator eggs. All that stuff is just floating. It’s got willow trees ended and it’s got wax melts [**00:15:04] was growing out of it. And Betsy Camille comes in a role that stuff up like a carpet and took it. He told me that pond sawdust, the big pond down there we call sawdust was off called, I can’t count bays I’ve got in there. His right in front of the wildlife camp. He said he called that the crazy pond. They would go in there was several different cuts that you could get in and out of it. They had brakes went out to the pass and they were paddling pirogue shooting neuters. He said they call it a crazy punk and when you went in, you didn’t know where you were coming out at because there were islands that were floating out there. Will is growing on with their, on them. They’re laid up on those islands and those islands would move with the wind, they were floating and it would move and if the wind shifted they would move to the other side. I mean you may have to go out a different way than the way you went in. And he told me stories just absolutely phenomenal what that country was like and in the game and all, it was really a really unique place. The first time I went down there duck hunting, my friend Jerry Klein Peter brought me down there 1972 duck hunting. And there wasn’t a soul down there. See prior it was public hunting in but prior to that they had lottery hunt, you got drawn and they would pick you up in a boat and bring you down there and they had these little small camps and they will drop you off, you had to bring you a Coleman lantern and a bedroll and your food that you’re going to have and they will drop you off for two days. They supply the duck boats and the decoys and paddles and they just drop you all come back after two days later. Well the hurricanes took those camps out so what they did, they just open it up to public hunting like it is now and back then it was morning hunt only, now that’s a big controversy going on now and they’re hunting two o’clock without a mud motor with a mud motor and that’s 02:00 I’ve been a pirogue and that’s a whole another story and whole another argument. But the mouth of the river, the real unique place was washing away fast. And what Ted O’Neill wrote in his book, the newest formed Delta is the fastest eroding because it hasn’t had a chance to subside and compact like it has an older forming deltas. See the river it went out toward the Atchafalaya now, then it broke off the shortest route to the gulf of the east it broke out and went down to the east. Well now it’s trying to go back down to Atchafalaya because if you’re measuring miles from the old river structure, which is where the river breaks out, was trying to break off from the old river structure of the gulf down and Atchafalaya is a lot closer than going out of Mississippi. In 1973 was a flood of record beside the 1927 flood and they almost lost that structure down there then. And after that Congress passed a law, you got to take all the water coming down the Mississippi river and combine out all the water coming down the Atchafalaya and combine the two and adjust those locks where 30% goes down the Atchafalaya and 70% goes down the Mississippi River. And that’s how they regulate and that affects us on Black River, we’re 20 miles north of the river structure. When the river rises, it matches, we rise and we rest on a whole different river system is because they’re putting more water on our sides backing us up. But the source of life, all this was formed by the river. You know, it’s a real unique deal. You know, people don’t understand the geology of our lives. I got a couple of stories on that too in particular, one of them down the ballpark swamp. I had camps and land lease and houseboats. I drilled about trying to think about nine water wells. Every one of those water wells I drill when I got down between to 30-35 ft. I had freshwater clam shells. I’m talking, I’m in the middle of the woods, aren’t up with cypress trees everywhere and I’m hitting clam shells at 30-35 ft. That was all freshwater lake bottom at one time that was covered up with sediments from the river and then humus and cypress and gum trees on top of that. It’s just a real unique part of the world. I have got another great story about the river forming everything. I got my back door neighbor here Carry Boon in a contract and dirt contracting business on Escobedo dump trucks and all this. He called me one day because he knew a lot about cypress. He says, man, I got these cypress stumps. I dug up I want you to come look at it. He said, I saw one of his most beautiful lumber I’ve ever seen. He said, we’re digging a lake right now. This is off between south LSU not far from the river. He said, we took out the biggest oak trees I’ve ever taken out. He said, I’m down 35 ft. and I’m hitting the tops of these cypress trees down under the ground. He said, I’ll shrew it off. He said, I’m digging them up and hauling them out of here. He said some big flood must have come through here thousands of years ago and broke these trees off. And I kind of thought about that a little while I forgot fun with him. I got to thinking about it. I said aren’t no flood did that. Hurricane can’t take out of cypress tree much less a flood. I called him back. I said Kerry, I said I know what got them tree, he said, what’s that thing? I said, one thing could have done that that was a glacier. I said aren’t no flood and aren’t no hurricane taking them trees out, and they covered up 35 ft. of material on top of them from the river. I said I was a cypress bright at one time and it probably has subsided somewhat but it all covered up with material from the river. But the other thing could have shacked them stumps off would have been a glacier and that I’m convinced that’s exactly what it was. He was going to have them carbon dated, but I don’t think he ever did to see how old they were, but they got to be thousands of years old.
Ramsey Russell: It aren’t no telling what did you end up doing with it?
Warren Coco: He held behind his house, I don’t know what he ever did with it. He sold couple of them up, but it was a choice because you had to pressure wash all the mud off of them and it was a nightmare to sell, I don’t know what he ever done with them.
Ramsey Russell: Talking about that Mississippi River and all the sediment, it’s unbelievable how much or how big The Mississippi River watershed is. The sediment load coming down that river is coming from what 40-45 percent of the continental United States of America. That’s unbelievable.
Warren Coco: I don’t remember the exact number. It is a massive number. But my friend Jimmy. He really kept up with a lot of things. He told me the mud came down the river, the sediment came down the river where the turning plow was developed in the Midwest because that’s when they lost all the topsoil. And they said that all the topsoil came down the river. And so that’s when the mud came. When you look at a high river. Now, it’s almost fishable. It’s not like it was 40 years ago. You know, it’s totally different. You don’t have the sediment mass coming down that you’re used to. And we talked a lot about the river and the land and how much was lost down there in just the time he was there from the 60s to the time I was there with him until the 90s. And he told me a great story, said Bennie Logan who was the head of the while he ran that camp down there for a wildlife and fishers. It was a big facility and he told the two guys over that, that I knew both of them one of them I knew real well. He was head of the firm Refuge Divisional Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries. Benny Logo had been down there all his life and that’s when after the storms and everything started washing away and they lost them. The floating marsh and all of everything was arose from the waves and lack of sediments coming down the river. And what they did when they channelize the river, they set up they start dredging the river and all the sediments now is going out southwest pass which will keep the ship channel open, and then we’ll get into dredging here in a minute what they’ve done down there. But Benny Logo told them, he saw, he had been on there all his life and he saw what happened when the river broke over the river bank, what would happen it would form a Delta. He told Allan Zeeman and other people of wildlife and Fisheries is the only way you’re going to save this country is come down here and dynamite these past banks, blow them out everywhere and you’re going to for more land. Well, that is now called a diversion. Back then nobody would listen to him. But now they’re spending the money. They come in with a dragline, I’ve seen, they put one in sawdust, they put them all over. Now the reason we went to Washington fall was the permitting of the mid Barrett terry diversion that was going to be not advancement further north. But this is what a river does when you break that pass mine, that water goes through that brake and it starts dropping sediments. It drops, you have your sediments your sands and as you go further and further out, you start dropping fine and fine sediments, you start forming land. At Jimmy’s camp, he built his camp on oil well location was a dead end canal there was a dry hole. And he went, he showed me a picture when he cut the end of that bank with a shovel. And he showed me a picture of his daughter and his son floating through that cut in the number three washtub. When they were children, like four years old. I saw pictures of that. Well when I started fishing down there, standing his camp that cut had formed land and a by that ran for some 800 yards just from that cut he made with that shovel from the river flowing through there at high river, and it dumping that sediment and flowing. The coal [**00:24:48] would come in with a hopper dredge and dredge the channel. The dredge right there had to pass as they did a lot of dredging right there because I was the spot where the sediments would build and it would hinder the flow of ship traffic for commerce. So that big hopper dredge was split in the middle of his hands. You would open up and dump, they would close it, it has suctions on each side of it and they would run that thing that would suck up sediments off the bottom and store them in the hull of the hopper of the ship. It would go over bypass opened up and run and dump it all out. Well now that feeling then pass Louis. So then they got the bright idea they come in with a suction dredge and set up where they’re dumping the sediments and they started pumping out on the lien. I’ll never forget when the court had contacted Don which most his land was all washing away. They contacted him about pumping that mud upon his land, he told him so I’ll take all the mud you all give me send it off. He said I’ll take it. And now they have formed a lot of land down on the north side of the river and pass Louis. You can look go to google earth and go back. That picture is the aero photographs don’t start to about 1998. But you go to current and look back and you’ll see how much has washed away on the lower end of Garden Island Bay east of the river on the south side. But then you can also look at where they pump that dredge spoil and filled in those big ponds. Like the big pond behind what my friend’s camp was that’s all just about all field in now. They pumped that river sediment in there. But the day we went to Washington for was to protest the corps engineers. You know, they told them they would have a permit form in X amount of time. Then they come up and then they backtracked that well it’s going to take five or six years. I said there’s no excuse for this. There’s no reason. Well, they got to study this. They’ve got to study that. They got to study this, that’s the way federal government and the core works. And I’ve been involved with the core, a couple of different projects of my own the permitting process. The most frustrating thing I’ve ever done in my life is having to deal with core engineers. They don’t get in a hurry for nobody and they don’t care. And that was our reason for going to Washington was to push the congressmen and senators to push the core, push this project. We need this done. Now there’s been bad tide diversion is going to do, it’s going divert freshwater sediments into the Barataria basin, which used to flow when bayou Plaquemine flowed and bayou dismay [**00:26:55] would flow all these bayous used to flow water into the marsh and it would divert and it would lower the splint and you had all kinds of vegetation. And since they’ve lost that, all those bayous have been cut off, bay La Fourche was one of the main tributaries they got that’s back flowing again, but not at the volume it would flow at high river in the flood. Well, our purpose was to speed up this process to make them go ahead and issue that permit. Well, they got to study everything to death. And the other problems you have you got the commercial fisherman fighting you, the oyster fishermen are fighting you, the shrimpers are fighting you.
Ramsey Russell: What did they fight about? Because it seems like the loss of the march would hurt their livelihoods.
Warren Coco: They are only looking at what’s there now, they’re catching fish and oysters here. They’re fish and crabs here now when that diversion comes through, the whole thing changes not brackish water anymore saltwater, right. What people don’t understand the reason we have such a large fishery in Louisiana is because the estuary, we have the freshwater, the brackish water than the salt water. Florida don’t have near the fishing we have they got the pretty white sandy beaches. They don’t have the muddy slot we have that creates the habitat that grows the shrimp that grows the fish that grows the crabs, grows everything. That’s why the best bill fishing in the worlds off is the coast of Louisiana. It’s because of the river. The river is the source of life for everything. The estuary is what makes all the food source. You start out with the shrimp, the crabs, the pogues [**00:28:36] and all the cockomenis the shroud, redfish all that is a result of the estuary of the fresh water to the brackish water, to the salt water. If you’ve got 100% salt water like Florida. Florida’s got a few rivers but they aren’t got the Mississippi River and the Atchafalaya River. So they don’t have the resource we have and what’s happening the special interest roofs, the oyster fisherman play the strongest lobbyists in in the state. They’re very, very strong. Those guys are fishing oysters where their grandfathers walked on the marsh and trapped. I can remember driving across Empire Bridge and Empire. It was solid marsh all the way to Scofield bait. You look out there now solid water all the way out there it’s gone because it’s all washed away it’s all eroded due the lack of the river, the river is not flowing, building the landing anymore. And what this mid Barrett tide diversion is going to do. It’s going to change everything. Anything you do like that is going to affect somebody negatively. But the overall impact of it is going to be a positive effect for the state. I’ve said for years, you want to fix the coast Louisiana. You give me the keys to the big monster. That’s core engineers. And I’ll make the intercostal canal flow west all way to Texas. And I’ll show you how to fix the state will get sediments in fresh water and things. But you got to tell our special interest groups go to hell, you’re going to be fighting speckle trout fisherman, rod real fishermen, you’re going to be fighting shrimpers, you’re going to be fighting the crabbers, you’re going to be fighting everybody with their at an intermediate point in their professional life of what they’re doing, where they’re catching fish here and they’re catching crabs here and they’re catching shrimp here. But as things erode, they haven’t moved further and further north. And with this diversion, because it was going to push them, they’re not going to fish the same location. They’re going to have to move, they’ve got to move further south to get more brackish water. But the estuary is the source of life in this whole system.
Ramsey Russell: I had heard that the reason this part of the gulf coast was the most productive shrimp in waters on God’s earth was because of all the grass, because of all the cover, because of all that estuary where that marsh you’re talking about and our rivers on this part of world Louisiana, Mississippi feed mud, feed that sediment. You get over to Florida its clear rock rivers coming out of that part of world Clearwater on sand. And you look at the oysters now, Atchafalaya basin has got just real clear mantles, totally different looking oysters than the ones that come out of Louisiana Mississippi. But I had always heard that marsh is being lost because of erosion because of sedimentation we talked about is that was why there were so many shrimp. You know, they say there’s more shrimp than there are stars in the sky.
Warren Coco: It’s an estuary farm. It’s the food source it’s the food chain that starts out organisms and it’s all starts with the estuary, which is the brackish water, which is fresh water going to salt water makes brackish water. And then the further south you go, the south you get, the most splinter you get. And you know my I did a big wetland restoration project on my property at hackberry, I spent a quarter of a million dollars on the marsh buggy excavator and I funded the project myself. Nobody does that. Everybody tries to a project like this is, is looking for federal funding for a grant. And when I started this, I was in contact with a very close friend of mine, Bob Dave. He is a director of development for ducks unlimited. He’s also a biologist and he helped me kind of helped design my project slightly, but he’s more of an adviser as anything else. But he’d help me, I did all permit process myself. I wrote to permit did it all, got my nephew to do the drawings and what I did with where I’m at in hackberry we’re not washing away like the mouth of the river because we’ve got older settlements that have compacted. There we got more solid marsh. When I dig with excavator, I get down about seven ft. I got to have teeth on the bucket, I can’t dig. That’s how tight the soil is. But the top is washing away. And so I put my project together and send in. You know you got a permit, one goes to DNR and one goes to Corps engineers you got to two different permits. Then I looked at it saw one of the site visit, I said fine come on girl. I brought a girl out there she was going to go on a boat with outboard motor said no I said I’m going to take you out there and bring you everything you want to see. So I brought out there she looked at everything, she documented everything, took pictures. She said this is a great project. I want to see is people do projects like this, this is what people never do. The core took three years. I had a permit from the DNR in eight months. And with the core the feds you get involved, nationally fisher’s got input, Fishing and Wildlife Service has input and Department of Wildlife Fisheries has input for the state to get all these people. And the guy with the National Fisheries, they don’t want you closing anything up, which I didn’t want to do. I just want to slow the tight land your down because of the sediment loss I was having through the years. So when I come to a site visit, you all come on in my load you up and bring all of you all. So I got them all on my boat, brought them out there. We pulled up. The first spot we stopped, has some algae growing on the side of the area. We stopped and the girl from the core said, what’s that? And I kind of look at it kind of rolled my eyes. The guy from national refuge said that’s algae that grows here in the summertime says, oh she doesn’t know what she’s looking at, this is the girl that’s going to issue my permit. So we lay there we go up in front of my duck blind, wide open water. You know, I took my push poll the hand and the guy national refuge said to feel the bottom, tell me what you feel. I said that’s a hard clay bottoms that’s right, Crank the boat up, pulled over about 200 yards to the West side of the region grass growing every. Tell me what you feel now, he says soft slushy bottom on top of that clay. He said that’s right. I see that sediment that used to be out there where we stopped a while ago. It’s gone it’s out in the canal and went out in the Gulf. Because what happens, we’ll get a cold front coming in here you get a south wind for cold front. It churns up everything makes wave action, suspends the sediments. Then here comes an [**00:35:24] that goes up on bottom, out to the water, out to the gulf there it goes, it’s gone. With this project what I’m going to do is I’m trying to save what I got when I put this levee in these structures that’s going to slow to tide lands, slow that flow down and keep my sediments where they’re supposed to be instead of losing them to the gulf. And I had a legitimate deal. I mean, it was, it was a black and white issue. Nobody could argue the point. And then the terrace levy is what they do that I built build out across open water that stops the turbulence so the water clears up sort of aquatic vegetation can grow. And all of that my whole project has worked 140% of what I claimed it was going to do, everything has worked right. But the problem is the permit process needs to be streamlined it’s too hard and too painstaking to go through the problems and the cost of what you got to do. Most people are hiring engineers to do this at $100 an hour. Well I wasn’t paying somebody for $100 off or something I can do myself because I was familiar what needed to be done. But I made a good argument that one of the most frustrating things that had happened, this all goes out for public notice. I get a woman behind a desk with now she was with the Fishing and Wildlife Service in Dallas Texas, trying to accuse me of trying to turn a brackish marsh into a freshwater marsh. Can I tell you? I also live it? I couldn’t, I couldn’t think right. I waited a day and I sent an email back. I said, I appreciate your interest in my project but let me clear up your interpretation. You know, explained to her I’m not closing anything up. This is not going to become a total freshwater marsh. The water still comes and goes, all I’m doing is slowing it down.
Ramsey Russell: Because if that water speed slows, it drops sediments.
Warren Coco: It doesn’t carry sediments. You have no current, nothing moving. If you go from a 60 ft. wide cut 6 ft. deep to a 48 inch pipe, guess what you just slowed a lot of water down and you do that for locations and watch what happens. And it’s still open to the gulf. The National Fisheries don’t want the organisms, they want the crabs the fish they want everything to move. And I want the same thing. You know, I don’t want to stop it. I just wanted to slow it down and I accomplished that with the way I designed my project.
Ramsey Russell: That’s good. Tell me this about this area down in southeast Louisiana. How important is that land? I mean what are the likely consequences if that Marsh just continues on its present trajectory of sinking without replenishing? Because the initial soccer was, it’s always a new delta. It’s always been sinking back during the peak of sediment loads, back when that marsh was thriving, back when there’s a lot of Roseau cane and other stuff holding that sediment in place. It was building to it was it was losing but it was continuing to build and maintain itself. And now it’s not, now the balance has shifted, it’s just losing, it’s not rebuilding, you know, in in my opinion, and I’m judging this just on evidence boy, you let a good storm surge come in and hit southeast Louisiana and wipe out all that desirable duck food in that marsh. Let the salinity get high and wipe out that food all things equal. We’re probably going to have a pretty darn good duck season up to fly away. The ducks come down to realize there aren’t no groceries and come right on back the Mississippi Delta.
Warren Coco: We’re gaining in some places, and we’re losing in more places than where we’re gaining. Where we’re gaining is exactly where the river is depositing at the mouth of Atchafalaya delta wax like outlet in some places down the river, where they build a diversion, they’re gaining. And it’s you’re not only losing a duck habitat, you losing the fisheries habitat because you’re going to lose the bigger part of the estuary. Katrina took out more square miles of Roseau canes at the mouth of river than any storm I’ve ever seen. Well, what people don’t understand that’s not all salt water down there were fishing one time delta water pass on the east side of mouth of river, throwing a plastic Coco member up against catching redfish friend of mine was with me. Look, man, I just had a 5 pound bass followed my bait up. I mean, I turn around, I’m looking at all wrecks. And we don’t see shore. It’s all Roseau canes and had Waterhouse’s saying that’s all fresh water.
Ramsey Russell: That’s all coming out of Mississippi river.
Warren Coco: It’s all coming up the river. So we switched up put plastic worms on, we call limited bias, we call 20 bias right there and then went back to catching redfish after that. But that’s a changing delta down there. It gets salinity, it gets fresh water and those canes can live with that. But what’s happening when you cut that sediment off those canes grow out of that water and when those canes are there, they slow the water flow down, the sediments drop and it builds and it builds and they came in there when they came in and dredged the river. Whenever the hopper dredge was dumping that sand and it plugged up pass Louis, pass Louis where the sailing ships used to come up. He got all plugged up, you can’t run outboard motor down at all you got as far as a channel. If you don’t know where to go, I can’t run it, you know, because I don’t know where to go. So when they cut out that deep channel and fill it in with your volume of water was going down and going out all those tributaries, feeding everything was cut off. So you start losing land down there and then when you get a big storm like Katrina, it just takes the wave action it just deteriorates. It just washes everything away. I said for years, the only way we’re going to save mouth of rivers with big rocks. They got to build built and whether it’s cost feasible, I can’t answer that. But rocks, all I’ve ever heard about rocks is they’re very, very, very expensive. And the need to coming in rock to seashore at the mouth river to stop those storm tides. And you got to put big rocks, not three ft. boulders, six and eight footballs that’s what you got to put, because the wave action is going to toss them and roll up with a storm. It’s just we’re losing and what everybody with the mid military diversion is going to do and all the other things that they’re trying to do is buy time, slow it down. And just like they got a big project, they’ve been talking about this project and Maureupa swamp for years and years and years. And that’s the hope canal diversion. And I’ve got to look and that’s right there where I was hunting Maureupa. They had a big meeting down at reserve Louisiana about that diversion, you know, public deal. So let me go down there and see what’s going on. I went down there and listen to them and everything you got to say because everybody kept saying oh this is going to bring the swamp back, it’s going to save the swamp, that’s going to save the swamp. Well muddy water aren’t going to get rid of all the high since in salvation and float on. You know, I mean that just don’t work and I want people under the impression this is going to say swamp. So I went down there to listen to see what was going on and with the objective with that diversion is to save what they call the land bridge. That’s the land between Lake Ballpark, Lake Pontchartrain because they ever lose that the gulf is going to be up to Baton Rouge almost it’s going to bypass New Orleans. And the biggest the best thing that could ever done they plug to Mr. Go that’s the Mississippi river gulf out the canal. They dug a channel to get ships in New Orleans on the east side of the wall and I just carried that saltwater right in and they just wiped out everything you know down shell met Louisiana where used to be cypress trees out in the marsh all dead. I saw that 25 years ago and they’ve been killed by the Mr. Go and when they came in then they plugged up with rocks and shut that saltwater off. Now what you have at the LA branch marsh which is on the south side of Lake Pontchartrain drive across I-10, you can see it out. All that Celente is almost gone. It’s almost freshwater, which is good and bad because now you got an underwater housing society Vienna, but you don’t have saltwater killing everything. So it’s kind of a tradeoff. You know, there’s no perfect world. You can’t make everything be perfect as you would want it for your application. I want shrimp. I don’t want all that fresh water, but if I want to save the land, yes, I want that fresh water. But my way I said, you need a combination of both. The best world is a combination of salinity. Not high salinity, but some salinity control your nonnative exotics, that you don’t want it to enhance your duck foods. You know, my primary wants is ducks. You know that’s what I want to save. But I also want to save the seafood. Yeah, that’s the estuary for the fish and the shrimp and the crabs because its areca the shrimp and crab in the industry is a great, and the alligator industry is a great resource for state Louisiana. Alligator industry is a big deal. That’s how we got a unique part of the world. There’s no other place in the world like South Louisiana and what we’re trying to do, like when we solicit these congressmen, senators were just trying to save what we got. But that’s what’s so frustrating is the way government works. It’s slower than a snail’s pace.
Ramsey Russell: Especially the Corps of engineers.
Warren Coco: Yeah. Everybody is critical of the core and the core is to blame for this core to blame for that. But the channelization of the river. Well, it had to be done period, you know, but now we’re suffering the repercussions, 100 years later of what was done back in the 1920s. You know, I mean, it’s just the channelization of the rivers, what did this, is what caused most of the problems, but that was done for flood control. Nobody wants the house his flooded. If you didn’t have the levees on the river, look what would be flooded, especially the past two years, all the water we’ve had, but everybody needs to read the book, the rising tide. It’s all about Mississippi River, commerce, cotton. I never realized what cotton was worth till I read that book. There was more money in banks of New Orleans than it was in Chicago and New York combined because of cotton.
Ramsey Russell: Rising tide by John Barry about the 1927 flood is one of the most epic books I’ve ever read. It’s a very, very good book. And I would also point anybody who’s interested in this topic about vanishing paradise to find a book called Vanishing Paradise. It’s written by a guy that came down here to I guess down around Venice Louisiana or down around Gate on somewhere down here in south Louisiana, south of I-10. And I don’t remember why he wanted to hitch, ride and travel with somebody shrimp boat folks. But he did and he became aware acutely aware of this Paradise Vanishing in this topic matter we’re talking about. He wrote a book that was very, very interesting. I read it right before Katrina hit.
Warren Coco: Another point I want to hit on about how things have changed. The channelization of the river really hurts Southeast Louisiana with the channelization of the ship channels in Southwest Louisiana is what got us over there. The guy I mentioned who wrote the book, muskrats Louisiana. Ted O’Neill. Well when I was hunting hackberry with James Lowry, Ted was still alive and he made a point with James and came out there and I was with him and probably not there in the marsh. And he wanted to quiz him about what the land look like, what it was before the ship channels and all that. And we drove out there and what you see was all open water for miles and miles. That was all narrow blade cut grass. He said when the ship town was dug, the salinity came in and it killed all the cut grass and said, now this is all open water, well, all the open waters a plus for the fisheries industry, but it’s a minus for land loss. And now what, they’ve come in and done the same thing. I’ve done we don’t have a river to feed us over there, to build sediments to pile, to build land. The only thing you can do in that part of the world is built terrace levies, you build terrace levies, low lying levee that the basic levies goes all the way to the pond bottom and you plant grass on it to keep it from washing away from wave action. And what the terrace levies it does, it clears the water stops the turbulence from the wave action. Water clears up so the aquatics can grow and that’s the food source for the ducks, as a food source for the fisheries, food source for the shrimp crabs, everything. It’s just part of the natural food chain. But the only way and I didn’t realize this, Bob did explain this to me. The only way you build land they did core samples back years ago and in the core samples of the soil, they would have clay and they would have black sediment clay, black and the black sediment would come ashore from hurricanes. That’s how it got it. When a hurricane would come, it would pick sediment up out of the gulf and bring it because when Rita came no, it was after I came. We had half inch of slush everywhere, everywhere you had water you had a half inch of slush sitting on it that came out of the gulf. That’s where all that came from. We had stuff grew that I had never grown before. We had plants and vegetation. I said, man, where’d all this come from? That was seeds. That was in that sediment that came out of the gulf. I mean it was, I’m trying to think it would be an annual plant it wouldn’t grow back. It’ll grow that one year and it would die and I don’t know what it was called. It was a big hollow stem plant like a bush or grow then it would just die off.
Ramsey Russell: Where did it come from?
Warren Coco: Come out of the gulf. It was seeds that were lying dormant in that slush in the gulf that came over the sea shore. When all that water came.
Ramsey Russell: Crazy. You got anything else to add, Warren?
Warren Coco: Well, yes, waiting on Duck season.
Ramsey Russell: Waiting on duck season. Its Duck Season Somewhere is what we always say, guys, Thank you all for listening. You’ve been you’ve been listening Warren Coco. We’ve been talking about the Vanishing Paradise down South Louisiana. Just some different issues and topics pertinent to waterfowl and fishing and all the life down here in Louisiana. Thank you all for listening, join us next time Duck Season Somewhere.