Leave False River Alone . . .

Once again I read in the Morning Advocate that tax money is going to be spent to "improve" False River - again.  Improve what?  Well they say make it a "Trophy Lake Again." 
For those of you that do not know, False River is an ox-bow lake formed from the Mississippi River in the year 1700.  Ox-bow lakes occur up and down the winding Mississippi, indeed there is yet another in Pointe Coupee Parish that is known as Old River.  There is Lake St John, Lake Providence and others up the river from New Roads.  New Roads, the county seat of Pointe Coupee Parish is located on the north end of False River.

Some years ago Florida Bass were introduced into the lake.  They did well and a lot of big bass were caught while fishing in False River. So were huge Cat fish but they were not from Florida.  And for a while they introduced Striped Bass to the lake.  Stripe Bass are sterile and will not reproduce but they are fish devouring machines and probably did more damage to the fish population than anything else.  Ask the biological experts about that issue.

I can recall as youngster growing up in New Roads and living on the lake a lot of things.  While learning how to swim, there was no grass in the lake.  None, nada, nothing.  That was the era when detergents were introduced that had a lot of phosphates in them.  So a  lot of what might be called "grey water" today, was discharged into the lake.  It was not contamination per se.  But that enriched the lake so to speak along with random discharges of raw sewage from out houses and the like from the cabins along the lake side and yes from farms along the lake.

The lake is also part and parcel of the drainage system of a great part of Pointe Coupee Parish.  Water from New Roads streets goes into False River.  So does water from the fields, etc. drain into the huge body of water that comprises the lake.

I can recall back in the early 1950s where we had a 14 inch rainfall.  It occurred over the weekend.  Monday, it was  bright and sunny and then it happened.  Slowly but surely False River rose about six feet in about eight hours.  Places no longer in existence like Tropical Gardens were a wash in water.  It did not deter the drinking crowd, they just waded in and kept at it.  And it did not hurt the "Trops" either.  The venerable Trops burned down years later.  But that shows how the natural drainage system functions, excess water not absorbed by the fields runs into False River or otherwise we would have been flooded.  And that is a good thing.

The "Rougon Canal" was dug to allow the excess water to run out of False River.  The canal runs from the old light house (an old watering hole and restaurant, to Bayou Black (locally referred to as Bayou Gros Tete)).  Takes a while to pull a lot of water of a lake that is roughly 12 miles long and mile wide especially when the bayou is also struggling to take care of its normal water load from such a rain.  Took more than a week to bring False River back to its normal everyday level but by then hundreds of piers and camps had been damaged by the high water.

In the late 1950s grasses started showing up in False River.  I do not mean Water Hyacinths (pretty but choking water lillies), I mean grasses like Horn Wort.  Grass that grows in the water not on the water like Water Hyacinths.  I can remember great mats of the stuff out on the "flats."  The flats is the area at the ends of the lake where over time sediment has filled in the lake.  The flats were famous for catching Blue Gill fish - limit 50 a day.  Blue Gill were also called perch or Chinquiapen.
The grasses did not help those fish at all and more or less destroyed fishing on the flats.

They even sprayed the lake to kill the grasses in the 1960s.  I wonder how many of the do gooders recall that disaster.  Killing grasses also killed fish.  And it did not work.  Way too much grass and way too little areas sprayed.

Then modernization has kicked in.  No longer are there allowed septic systems along False River.  We had such a septic system with a drain field etc. at our camp.  Now we have a connection to the sewer system.  There is a capture tank, a pump and the sewage is lifted up to the main sewer and taken off to be treated.  No more discharge into the lake.

The grasses have disappeared.  Why?  I can tell you why.  The enrichment of the lake has stopped.  The lake does not have the minerals to sustain grass growth like it used to do.  We have cleaned up the lake.  Now that is not a bad thing but it does nothing to help the biologicals that live in the lake.  The so called protective grass beds are gone.  Well we did not have them when I was kid and fishing was just jim dandy.  So somebody is stretching the truth regarding the need for grass in the lake.

So I say to the experts leave my lake alone.  False River is mecca to sports boating now days.  Children do not have have Typhoid shots to swim in the lake as we did as kids.  Water skiing, Skidoos, power boats and even a few sail boats abound.  More problems with wake control than fishing control.  More problems with alcoholic consumption than fishing.  The lake is cleaner.

And yes, while I live in Texas we do maintain a camp on False River.  So we own a piece of the pie.

While visiting there a while back I noted Mullet jumping.  Mullet had sort of disappeared in the days of the grasses.  Mullet are food fish for the likes of Bass.  They are back.  That is a good sign.

Again, leave False River alone.