Messing About in Boats

Last Sunday my nine-year-old son and I went for a paddle on the Mississippi River and Bayou Sara near St. Francisville. Sunday was glorious—clear and still, with the woods a riot of bright early green beneath one of those skies that goes on forerver. It seemed a good day for rinsing a winter's worth of dust from our kayaks and for taking a look at the world from the waterline. Besides paddling around a pond once or twice, this was Charles's first outing under his own power, and he was duly impressed by the effort required to move a twelve-foot kayak upstream against the implacable vastness of the Mississippi River current. Still, once we made the mouth of Bayou Sara and nosed up into the slower-moving stream, he relished the freedom of charting his own course, weaving in and out of the willow saplings, pursuing every fish splash, and leaping out onto sandbars to identify the telltale signs of herons, raccoons, and beavers.

Bayou Sara is not the world's most beautiful waterway. Close to where it joins the Mississippi, the bayou is a wide, sluggish stream thick with sediment, that flows between high mud banks over which a regrettable amount of trash has been dumped by people too selfish and short-sighted to try any harder. But a mile upstream you pass beyond the parts of the waterway accessible by those without boats, and the bayou unfurls in a series of lazy bends shadow-dappled with stands of willow, edged by clean sandbars, past which a swirling current flows. For two hours or more we paddled upstream, spotting large turtles and small gators warming themselves in the early spring sunshine, and occasionally spooking huge fish that would boil out of the shallows beneath our keels, churning the opaque water as they sprinted for safer depths.

What a marvelous way to spend an afternoon. It was inspiring to see the joy with which a small boy discovers a formerly unconsidered wilderness that exists right at the edge of his small-town world. I loved watching him take the journey at his own pace, dependent on no parent or other adult to determine his forward progress. And I'm grateful for the broader definition of Sportsman's Paradise that he gets to experience now that canoes and kayaks have found their way onto Louisiana's rivers and waterways. There's a lot to see once you get away from the main road. And around here, at least, you don't have to go far to find it.

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The easiest way to access Bayou Sara with your own canoe or kayak is follow Ferdinand Street (LA 10) through St. Francisville, all the way down to the old ferry landing and put straight into the Mississippi. Paddle upstream keeping to the eastern bank of the river and you'll come to the mouth of Bayou Sara about 400 yards up. The further up the bayou you go the prettier it gets. Wear your PFD.