Disagreements between commercial fishermen and restorers of the Gulf of Mexico coast along the Louisiana shoreline continue to exist.
The fishermen fear that the 50-year restoration plans for the Louisiana coast would bring too much fresh water from the river into the coast to attract the salt water species of fisheries they want to catch along the coast.
The restoration plans call for opening up sections of the river levees to provide diversions of river waters into the marshes that bound our coastal area. This will bring sediment into those soggy areas that will help build up our coast to the way it used to be when south Louisiana had plenty of farmland instead of just marshes and swamps.
The fishermen, of course, love the salty water that provides development grounds for oysters and other saleable fish that they can catch almost at their doorsteps now. But with a bigger, more solid coast, the salt water will still not be far away.
Of course, the bigger the coast, the better. The restorers purpose is to restore the coast outward to where it once was and Louisiana would have a larger fisheries production area and some more solid ground to make the coast more permanent. We can’t understand how the fishermen can disagree when the end product would be a larger fishing area along the coast while the land continues to build up.
The fact that the coast is being restored does not mean the salt water fish will be that far away.
And the healthier and more productive our fisheries remain in our midst, the more population of commercial fisheries it will attract.
It seems obvious that the larger our productive coast becomes in the future, the more valuable it will be to the fishermen and the land owners along our coast. In other words, the more our coast grows in the future, the more production we can accomplish insofar as commercial fishing is concerned.
Let’s face it – if we lose more of our coast, we will lose more of the land that makes the Louisiana coast so valuable. We need to retain the land we have and build on it and let the fishery industry benefit from the bigger and brighter future for Louisiana’s coast.
Our Gulf of Mexico coast is a bustling area.
It should grow by leaps and bounds in the future. In fact, the entire coast of Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico is one of the liveliest in the nation.
We need to build up the great benefits we can derive from having such a coast at our doorstep.
We need to maintain it as a great fishing ground and area for the production of minerals, as well as a doorway to the rest of the world through an enlarged opening in the Panama Canal.
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