VENICE, La. — Don’t be afraid of the shrimp,” Venice Inn clerk Monica Stange said as she handed me my room key. “The seafood here is all fine.”
I didn’t doubt it. Ever since the BP oil spill a little more than a year ago, Louisiana seafood has faced intense testing and has passed state and national safety inspections.
I put my faith to the test less than half an hour later at Venice Marina, when Daniel Walker of Metairie, La., cut a sliver off his just-caught 51-pound yellowfin tuna and held it out to me on the end of his fillet knife. I popped it into my mouth, washing it down with a beer.
“Know what would make that better? A little of that Tabasco sauce,” said Wes Walker of Mandeville, La. The two, who claimed to be no relation (why didn’t I believe them?), had been out fishing for 24 hours and were tired but proud, having hauled in not only the yellowfin but also 11 blackfin tuna that looked to be at least 30 pounds apiece.
A scruffy-looking brown pelican — I had to wonder if he’d been scrubbed down with Dawn — gave us the fisheye as I talked to the day’s first returning anglers about Venice’s reputation as a fishing mecca.
“This is it,” said Marty Green of McRae, Ga. “There’s nowhere in the world that you can come and fish like this. We didn’t come 700 miles because it’s bad fishing.”
The marina is near the Delta National Wildlife Refuge, which you can’t visit — after Hurricane Katrina, it’s more water than land — but driving to the marina, you’ll see plenty of shorebirds.
This bayou-laced coast is acutely vulnerable to nature’s whims, but a foray into its unique terrain is rewarding because of the resilient and friendly people and the terrific seafood. Fishing is pretty much a religion here. Locals even throw lines into roadside trenches holding water as brown as a rich roux. (I’m told they’re after catfish.)
The oil spill hit this area before it had recovered from Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed many homes, restaurants and inns. Many full-time residents left after the storm.
Those who stayed on this finger of land at the mouth of the Mississippi River spent some recent weeks worrying about whether the river would top the levees and inundate their rebuilt homes and businesses. (Floodgates were opened elsewhere in Louisiana to keep that from happening.)
“It’s been a trip, I’ll tell you,” Stange said, adding that the Venice Inn was demolished by the hurricane, then rebuilt in time for the oil spill.
A year after the spill, Stange said, 11 BP cleanup workers were still staying there. “The cleanup will take a couple of years. We used to have a lot of bird-watchers and weekend warriors coming down here for the seafood. Katrina did a lot of damage, then this.”
Venice is dotted with drilling rigs and refineries, reminders that the oil business has been a boon to the local economy, employing many of its people. But hand-lettered signs and lawyer billboards show there’s still a lot of bitterness toward BP, whose damage settlements don’t please everyone.
Stange said the inn did all right on that score, though. “This place is owned by three lawyers,” she said.
It’s a no-frills motel, by the way. The room was spotless, Stange was helpful, and the free Wi-Fi worked, but the mattress was one of the floppiest on which I’ve ever slept, and the walls were so thin that we could hear the TV in one neighbor’s room and a guy snoring in the other.
Stange sent us 15 minutes up the road to Black Velvet Oyster Bar & Grill in Buras, nestled up against the levee, for dinner. On the way, we tried to stop by Fort Jackson, built in the 1800s and most recently used as a place to rehabilitate wildlife after the oil spill. It was posted off-limits to visitors, so we drove on — to big plates of crunchy fried shrimp.
If Black Velvet’s name makes it sound like a bar, that’s because it used to be one. After Katrina tore it down, its owner decided to rebuild with a kitchen. Good call.
Island time
The next morning, we headed out for Louisiana’s one true beach, Grand Isle. Getting there involved driving all the way back to New Orleans and then driving down another finger of land on Louisiana 1, past fishing boats and more lawyer billboards seeking folks wishing to sue BP. One hand-lettered sign bade farewell from a decades-old oyster company that said BP had run it out of business.
Our first order of business on Grand Isle, after we checked into our charming Blue Dolphin cottage across the street from the beach, was to get on the Internet and find out how to pay for crossing the Leeville Bridge, the only way onto the island.
This new toll bridge has no toll booths, but instead of billing drivers, Louisiana allows 96 hours for everyone who crosses the bridge to figure out how to pay the $2.50 toll or incur a $25 fine.
The answer: Go to and either find out where one of its pay stations is or call the 800 number, wait on hold and pay the toll with a credit card. It’s an annoying system for an area that direly needs tourists, and locals say they’re trying to get it changed.
Once on Grand Isle, we found a big tourist beach fronting the gulf with a broad expanse of sand.
Mostly, it’s an island full of houses and family camps with a handful of inns and only a few eateries — although those eateries were mighty fine. We enjoyed fried oysters and a charbroiled shrimp salad at the Starfish and perhaps the best broiled whole flounder (with a mildly spicy rub) I’ve ever had at the Lighthouse.
On a Sunday afternoon, I strolled the beach along with a handful of other people amid several oil-removal machines chugging up and down the beach. My visit was a couple of months ago. The machines have since finished most of their work, I’m told. They show up only occasionally to clean when some fresh oil washes up. Locals say there’s still a little oil and tar, but their main fear is that more will arrive later.
“I have divers staying with me that say there’s 200 miles of oil out there in the water,” said Marlene Chappell, who closed her Blue Dolphin Inn and Cottages from Thanksgiving until mid-February because, she said, she just had to get away from all the oil.
“Back then, it was all over the beach, like a slick,” she said. “I could taste it. I could smell it in my clothes and hair. I was losing the will to live. I had to get away. I was sick. The fumes were so bad when they were burning the oil. Your eyes would burn; your lungs would burn.” She fled to Coushatta, La. By February she was back in Grand Isle, welcoming people to her little lodge and pastel cottages. (Our cottage had two bedrooms with good beds, a full kitchen, updated bathroom, TV and free Wi-Fi.)
I returned from my walk with no tar on my feet, although I found waves consistently flecked with tar, which clung to seaweed that had washed up. The U.S. Coast Guard recently said that about 92 percent of Louisiana’s coast has been cleaned of oil, although Louisiana officials have said that’s an overstatement.
One of Grand Isle’s big attractions is Grand Isle State Park, and part of its beach just reopened in May after it was cleaned for oil. (Part is still closed.) For only a $1 admission charge, the park offers a good look at the gulf, as well as a walkway into a lagoon and a tower for looking at birds and the seascape. I watched squadrons of healthy-looking brown pelicans soaring over the island.
The next day we departed for our last stop, tiny Cocodrie, a fishing and shrimping village between Grand Caillou Bayou and Petite Caillou Bayou. We settled into a room at Coco Marina clearly designed for four fishermen (a bunk with a double on the bottom along with two single beds), but it was spotless and offered free Wi-Fi and coffee. The lack of a shower curtain did not deter me from showering.
We drove up the road to visit the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, a forbidding-looking research facility that very quietly welcomes visitors, absolutely free, to walk up in its observation tower and read explanations of how this came to be called Cocodrie (it means alligator in French), how this area’s ecology works in a salt marsh between the Gulf of Mexico and fresh island water, and why this place will never hold condos. (It’s too vulnerable.) The tower offers a broad view of the surrounding area.
Coco Marina’s restaurant was closed (it’s open for the season now), so we grabbed a good handmade hamburger and fries at Tradewinds Marina, eating them outside next to Petite Caillou on a picnic table. The marina’s owner said BP did all right by him; it kept his motel across the street full of cleanup workers.
What I’m thinking at this point is that this coast and its people are just different enough to make it an interesting side excursion combined with a trip to New Orleans. Keep in mind that accommodations are rudimentary (and inexpensive, typically $80 to $150) And, of course, if you like to fish, the big ‘uns are here for the taking, and they — and the local shrimp — are delicious.
