Deb and I have been working on some projects on the boat since she has been back aboard, and it was time to take a bit of a break. We went for a lovely Saturday drive around Lake Ponchartrain and just checked out every small road and little bayou access point.
While driving around, we found this area where people park their cars and then have to take boats to their homes. There are just no roads to get to them so this is truly a floating life style even though the homes are build on dry land between many different bayous, creeks, swamps, etc. Now that we have been in the area for a while, we are learning that these are referred to as “Fish Camps”. When we first saw them years ago we assumed that this is just a unique and different way of life, but always assumed that they lived their all of the time. What I am finding out is that while that is true for some folks, the vast majority of them use them like a lake house or summer house. They go each weekend by boat and just enjoy the very remote lifestyle away from the hussle and bussle of the city. There is plenty of fishing, crabbing, fresh oysters, catfish and plenty of beer on ice. We have seen fish camps that range from something the size of a shed to keep your lawn mower in, to some that are like large vacation homes.
We even saw a sign for a bar and grill called “Sun Buns” but it didn’t have a way to drive up to it. You either go to it by boat, or if you do drive there, you park under I-55 southbound near and there is a sign that says, Please use Callbox for transportation from the bank of the river to the Bar/Grill. That is pretty cool, no doubt, Deb and I will be checking that place out.
We then went to a really good restaurant on the south west side of the lake called Fernier’s Landing in LaPlace, LA. The food was very good. Deb had an oyster appetizer and a Crawfish Poboy. I had blackened Redfish. All of this was good and fresh and was a nice place. I do have to share a funny story though. Since we have been staying in Louisiana, Deb and I have started to pick up a little bit of the slang when we speak (not much be a little bit).
Every once in a while we will really hear someone with a thick cajun accent. That happened while eating. There was a group of about 8 people at a table a few down from us and a single voice was really standing out. It was a very thick cajun accent and the more we heard him talk the more Deb and I started to smile because he started to sound like the Assistance Coach from the movie WaterBoy. I finally couldn’t resist and longer and just hit the voice memo recorder on my phone and set it on our table. Keep in mind this person is about 15 feet from us, but you can still hear him very good. I could’t seem to upload just an audio file, so I put the sound as a backdrop to a few photos of Fernier’s Landing.
When we headed out in the morning, we were looking for some cool looking places to capture some video over the swamps and bayous with the drone. Deb and I are thinking about how we want to produce our intro videos for our blog and were getting some B-roll footage.
In doing so, we found a couple of really cool places. The first one was this great little place near the Tangipohoa River. I flew the drone down one direction and realized that it was not recording the video. Sadly the memory card went bad and it was starting to rain so we opted to just fly her for a bit of practice and then run out and get a new memory card. The picture to the right is taken from Deb where we were standing and you can see the drone over by an old wooden bridge that went across the swamp. It looked really cool and I do look forward to going back to this spot again so that I can get the footage on another day. While we were driving around, we also went by this little place called “Lee’s Landing” it was a little marina on the Tangipohoa River and we happened to notice what looked like a big old Tall ship up in this swamp.
It turns out that we ran right into an area where Shelby Stanga lives. For any of you that have ever watched the Discovery Channel show Ax Men, you know Shelby as the crazy cajun guy that gets sunken cypress trees out of the swamps and sells the wood. He also had his own spin off show called Legends of Shelby that is either still running or did for a few years. I do watch those shows, but didn’t see Shelby outside and there was certainly a lot of fencing around. I thought about flying the drone out over the river to get some cool footage of the boat, but on the show he shoots a gun about every 2 seconds so figured maybe I shouldn’t do that. Deb said that she was reading that at one point he shot one of the camera’s for the show because it kept getting too close to him when he was in the water. I didn’t need to see my drone go crashing down into the river.
During all of this running around, we also stopped and picked up the new memory cards we needed for the drone (We have a DJI Phantom Vision 2 +). We didn’t go back to that first place to film where the cards were bad, but will another day. Instead we found another place on the west side of Lake Ponchartrain and there was enough room to pull over and safely fly the drone out over the bayou. Later we attempted to get an arial view of the sunset over the swamp, but were not able to get to a decent location before the sun went down so we went ahead and tossed that footage. Below is the video we took off of Hwy 51 near Ackers, LA.