Paul Christiansen
Sometimes the best adventures begin where the road ends. Such was the case on a perfect Saturday afternoon in April, when we abandoned our car in a lot at the end of the bumpy Grand Bayou Village Road in Port Sulphur and boarded a crab boat.
From there, Captain Watson Perrin steered us along Grand Bayou, past stilted homes balancing in the water like storks, before turning onto Grandpaw Bayou towards a grouping of homes interconnected by an enormous dock.
It’s here where Perrin and his chocolate lab host Da Bayou Experience, a right-on-the-water accommodation offering air-conditioned rooms, three gourmet meals a day, and round-the-clock fishing. With enough room to sleep eight to ten people comfortably, Perrin hosts a wide variety of groups. The Cedar and Poplar Rooms each offer bunk beds, with their namesakes lining the walls, and both the indoor and outdoor dining areas can seat a crowd. The main attraction here, though, is the water’s edge access to unbeatable fishing.
Paul Christiansen
Perrin’s parents drove the first pilings on this property into the Grandpaw Bayou in 1969, and the original camp was finished in 1971. Over the years, the house settled and sank, and in the late seventies and early eighties, they went through the process of raising it back up.
“We were weekenders back then,” said Perrin, who grew up on the Mississippi River’s West Bank but spent much of his childhood exploring the bayous around his parent’s camp. “I used to swim all day, and I burned five gallons of gas a day in a little boat I drove around.”
The house is just across the bayou from the Grand Bayou Indian Village, an unincorporated community historically occupied by the Atakapa-Ishak and Chawasha tribes, and the only continuous Indigenous community in the country that is only accessible by boat.
Perrin’s cook, Carmalita Sylas, lives in the village with her grandson, Monk. A former cook at Woodlands Plantation, Sylas’s culinary skills are legendary. She whips up three meals a day for Perrin’s guests, including a five-course dinner featuring a menu of local dishes like redfish couvillion, gumbo, a seafood platter, and shrimp and oyster croquettes—not to mention her decadent chocolate a la mode brownies and coconut pies.
[Reads about Kristy Christiansen's jaunt to the Bayou Barataria town to Jean Lafitte here.]
Monk serves as Perrin’s deckhand for his day job as a commercial crabber. Before Hurricane Ida, Perrin had seven hundred crab traps but now only maintains about three hundred. He checks them all twice a week and harvests around two thousand pounds per week. He sells exclusively to Lapalco Seafood in Gretna, except for the soft shells, which he offers to passing boats for $60 per dozen.
Perrin’s lived here full-time since 2014 but started up Da Bayou Experience in 2021. In addition to lodging, meals, and dock fishing, he also sets up charter fishing trips, commercial crab boat excursions, and shrimp harvesting experiences—and will even on occasion bring in a local band for his guests. Business has picked up in early 2023, and he’s hoping for a busy summer. But it wasn’t easy getting here. After only hosting four or five groups in his newly opened Airbnb, Hurricane Ida hit in August 2021.
“It was heartbreaking to come out here after working for months to get it ready,” said Perrin. “I lost a whole roof section from the wind, and then there was a ten-foot tidal surge. Marsh grass was everywhere. I had to cut it up in squares with a chainsaw and pull it off with a boat. It took me almost eight solid months to rebuild.”
Perrin couldn’t even visit the property until late September. There was no power or water, and the mud stuck like paste to everything on the property.
“It’s the only real enemy we have out here,” explained Perrin, who is no stranger to hurricanes. During Katrina, his home on the backside of Biloxi Bay filled with twelve feet of water, while Perrin was trapped in his attic with his parents. “It was a humbling, scary, pray-to-God experience. I’ve learned if a hurricane is coming and it’s named after a woman, you leave.”
We were only staying for the day, so in no time my oldest son Charles had four poles rigged up, ready to go. Showing us around the camp, Perrin walked past an alligator gar mounted on the wall, stretched and flattened like a throw rug, and brought us to a long sink already full of softshell crabs. A divider rigged down the middle separated out the molting crabs. Using tongs, he lifted a crab from the left bin and pointed to a thin red line on the back fin.
Paul Christiansen
“It was a humbling, scary, pray-to-God experience. I’ve learned if a hurricane is coming and it’s named after a woman, you leave.” —Captain Watson Perrin
“The red-liners are close to shedding,” Perrin explained, moving the crab into the right bin. “When crabs shed their shells, they grow a half to one full size larger. Within twenty minutes of shedding, they start to get papery. We have to check them every two hours to make sure they don’t harden. They’re very hungry during this stage, so we also have to watch them because they’ll eat every other soft-shell crab around them. Once they shed, we wrap them in cellophane and freeze them.”
He chose a crab from the left bin and laid it on a table. “Murder, she wrote,” he joked, as he chopped it in half and handed it over to Charles to use as bait. Within minutes, one of his lines went taut, and he quickly set the hook and began the laborious process of reeling in the hefty catch. Perrin and his two friends gathered around to watch the battle unfold. Finally, Charles hoisted his twenty-four-pound black drum onto the dock. Only minutes after the fish was released, he reeled in a thirty-three pounder.
Paul Christiansen
Fishing is a major draw to Da Bayou Experience.
“When the fish are here, we catch them,” said Perrin. “There’s a huge oyster reef here, so that’s why the fish come. I just had a group—they caught 417 pounds of drum in two days."
It’s all catch-and-release off the deck—though there is one exception to this rule. At the annual Wounded War Heroes Fishing Rodeo every summer, Perrin allows his black drum “pets” to be taken. For the last eleven years, the first, second, and third place winning fish were caught off his dock.
“When the fish are here, we catch them,” said Perrin. “There’s a huge oyster reef here, so that’s why the fish come. I just had a group—they caught 417 pounds of drum in two days."
Perrin explained that Grandpaw Bayou is a “natural flow” bayou, with the tide turning in under twenty minutes. As we examined the shallow water on the backside of his dock, we saw five crabs scurrying through the mud with a school of minnows darting in between their sharp claws. In the fall, the water is filled with trout.
“This area is a fertile incubator for all seafood,” said Perrin. “They are all born and raised in these estuaries before they travel to the Gulf.”
We bided our time until sunset, walking the pier and swinging in the breeze while watching a towering cruise ship leave out the Mississippi. It was an overwhelming feeling of time slowing down at this watery home on the edge of civilization. As Perrin drove us back to shore, he commented that the worst part of coming here, was having to leave.
