dredging
 

do any of you salty cajuns know when the dredging in big lake will stop.

When all the Oyster Reefs are gone

talking about that barge dredgin and pumping that mud all over

Just so you will know......here is a picture of 2 Oyster boats I took earlier this week. I saw a total of about 30 Oyster boats..... ~ 1/2 in Big Lake and 1/2 in west cove. The ship channel is also being dredged by the north end of 9 mile cut. I should have taken a picture of the dredging operation going on in the ship channel. I found all the water in the SW part of Big Lake to a little muddy. Visability was ~ 6" compaired to 12"+ in other parts of the lake.

I never saw more than 3 Oyster boats working in one spot. The boats just stay in one small area......making circles back and forth.

.

raping and pillaging the oyster reefs until they are no more

Like a virgin at spring break.......

dink you on a role tonight.

Oyster season ends the 29th from what I hear. The ship channel will be ongoing, with everything they had to bring in to setup it may go all summer. The whole washout area looks to be shot for awhile.

Oyster seasnon ends at the end of April.
Last time I went out, there was 3 boats on a small reef about half the size of my house. They know where every freakin reef is, no matter how small, and are hitting them all.
They ain't hitting Turners yet, cause they said it is mostly clam shell.

Turners is off limits



I also was told by a guide that the oyster dredging was good for the lake.........I said I poke some beds that are destroyed he said they were still there............Well I double checked my self.........I went and poke a area where a bed had formed and it was gone.......I found the rocks but the oyster bed that formed to the left of the reef was busted up real good...

Also I went in to west cove........now I have waded this reef about 10times.......I know right were its at.........I got out and walked it just to see.............NOTHING...........I FOUND NOTHING But a few shells from what was a solid bed........

Same here. I poked a buttload of reefs in Jan. when the water was real low. Full of shell. Now it is just a hard flat rock bottom with a few loose shells on them.
I found a couple of reefs that were untouched last time I was off work, but it wasn't like it was last year. They have scraped almost every reef on the South end of the lake that I had on my GPS. They must ride around during the summer and watch where the fishermen fish to find all of them. Some of the reefs I had marked are super small, about the size of a pickup truck, and they still found and scraped them.
The clam and small oysters they pitched back are still there, but the shrimp and small fish don't have the cover they need to stay on the reefs. No bait, no fish.

When I was down near the west end of the old jetty......every few minutes there was an Oyster boat loaded down and headed south in East Fork going to Cameron.

There is a buyer on the East Fork. Last dock before T-Boys road. They have a few cooler trucks parked there. When they are full, they head to Virginia. This guy is not local, I can't remember his name.
The other buyer, School Boy, is on the ship channel, just South of the new MI mud plant. It is on a drainage ditch that runs behind Cameron.