Impact of oyster over harvesting on condition of fish in Calcasieu Estuary

[Smalls]

Originally Posted by Ray

There is a ship channel in the Sabine. It is just as deep as the one here.
They have more fresh water, cause the Sabine, Neches and ICW run down to the Gulf from there. Lot more fresh water from East Texas.

There is a lot of erosion along the banks of Big Lake. The island is gone in front of Grand Bayou. At one time, you could not go straight into it.
Also, the marshes are probably 70% gone behind the levee. If it wasn't for the levee, it would be a lot worse. There are huge ponds back there that were once small ponds.
Oilfield canals don't help either.
Boudreaux Lake used to be about 20 acres. It is now about 300 acres in size.
The ponds in the reserve have gotten 10 times bigger in the past 30 years.
They built that levee around the lake a long time ago, but didn't put the weirs up. That helped, but it just slowed the erosion down.
Cameron Parish can disappear, or we can have more shrimp. Cameron Parish is hurricane protection for Calcasieu Parish. No Cameron Parish, no Calcasieu Parish.
I remember when the lake was a lot deeper. On opening weekend of Shrimp season, the lake was full. Texas boats, big ones came into Big Lake the first week, then went back to Texas when their waters opened up.
There was also green grass at the mouths of Grand and Lambert. When we pulled out nets up, we would shake the grass and the Shrimp would fall out on to the culling board.
There is a big lake behind Tboys weirs, where a great marsh used to be.

If you think Hurricane Rita busted the levee's, I got some good desert land to sell you in the middle of Big Lake.

x2

Most of what I said, but in shorter form. Thanks for the info on the Sabine though, I knew I had that somewhere, but wasn't sure of it. Actually just looked back on a report I have from 2003 i think. Stated that they had actually intended to extend (or deepen) the Sabine-Neche Ship Channel to Beaumont. Haven't looked that up, but did they actually do this?

Also, because of the intracoastal, the two basins are actually connected. Gum Cove ridge used to serve as a barrier between the two, but the intracoastal bisected that. Now their hydrologies are directly affected by one another. So I imagine there isn't much difference between the two, although since it has 2 major inflows as opposed to one, the Sabine probably trends somewhat fresher, as you said. So I can believe that.