Rouses Everyday - September & October - page 30

28
MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER 2014
the
Outdoors
issue
T
he camps in Bayou Dularge are all built on stilts. They may
or may not be built on dry ground. My friend Jon Guidroz’s
camp is built over water, which means you have to launch a
boat to reach it, which we do, at least twice a year.
There are usually eight of us, all old friends. Jon keeps a bunch of
junky 25-engine flatboats at the camp for us so we can fish two to
a boat.
I would rather go to Bayou Dularge and fish inland than fish
offshore any day of the year.
It’s funny we never caught anything in Bayou Dularge when we
were kids, but now we catch fish every time. There’s a theory that
the currents in Houma somehow changed after Katrina. Or maybe
we’ve just gotten better as we’ve gotten older.
The water is pretty brackish in Dularge (the further south you go,
the less saltwater there is in the mix).We catch speckled trout, black
drum, redfish, sheepshead, big bulls. There are alligators, nutria,
raccoons, even porpoises in Dularge (they’re all over the lakes
around Dularge and in the Gulf ). On the last day, we always throw
out crab traps.
You can fish year-round right off the banks of
South
South
Louisiana, but fishing moves to the marshes like Bayou Dularge in
September. Fishing doesn’t really heat up for a while, though. The
specks start biting around Thanksgiving. That’s when teal season
opens, too, although like specks, teals get easier in November. We
hunt teals, wood ducks and green ducks from boats and blinds. My
favorite thing in the world is to hunt in the morning, fish in the
afternoon, cook at night.
THE ROUSES RUN
It’s not just about the fishing and hunting; it’s also about the food.
Here’s our deal at Jon’s: I bring all of the food, I cook all of the food,
everybody else pays for the alcohol and gas. It’s a fair trade.
We need two carts at Rouses before a fishing or hunting trip. I take one
"In the summer, we fish east of Grand Isle by Quatre (Four
Bayou Pass) and Couple Abel Pass, which goes into Barataria
Bay. We hit the water at daybreak, and we’re back at the camp
by noon. If you haven’t caught fish in five or six hours, the beer
is the only reason to stay out there, and we know we’ve got
plenty of that back at the camp. Late September, October, we
fish the marsh. We launch in Bayou Dularge where my friend
Steve Richard keeps a camp — and an icebox full of beer."
—Tommy Rouse, 2nd Generation
Tommy Rouse
Good
Bill
Hunting
by
Chef Bill Briand, Fisher’s at Orange Beach Marina
A lone White Egret guards the entrance to the last remaining live Cyprus grove near Bayou Dularge, South Louisiana. — photo by
Capt. John Swallow (EddShots.com)
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