Going now isn’t a very good time

No report today.

All freshwater, brackish-water and saltwater locations that provide so much activity for summer’s “final weekend” should be off limits to all fishermen.

There’s no way we can celebrate the Labor Day weekend when there’s so much to do after Hurricane Isaac.

Wednesday’s news from every area east of the Mississippi River indicated water from the storm’s surge covered Shell Beach, Hopedale and Delacroix. Access to Venice will be limited, if Plaquemines Parish officials allow it.

The areas on Pontchartrain’s north shore took a hit and, like the Baton Rouge area, there was debris covering nearly every road, and it will takes days to clear launches at Mandeville, Dockside Bait & Tackle and Rigolets Harbor.

Grand Isle and Fourchon were covered with as much as four feet of water early Wednesday morning, and reports were that the storm’s eye wall was over the control gate on Bayou Lafourche south of Golden Meadow.

Images along La. 56 at Chauvin showed power lines down and floodwaters building, which means access to Cocodrie will be limited well into September. Four Point, Dulac and Theriot were facing similar problems.

The Florida Parishes’ freshwater rivers will be swollen, if not over their banks, through the weekend.

Water was reported pushing into the Lake Verret basin with some low-area flooding along roadways in Assumption and St. Mary parishes.

Then there’s the Atchafalaya Basin and remembering the disastrous fishing effects Hurricane Andrew had on the basin 20 years ago. That’s when state fisheries biologists documented a fish kill estimated at 175 million fish, among them 5 million bass.

Fish kills

Inland fisheries biologists at the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries are asking the public to help them investigate fish kills in the wake of Hurricane Isaac.

History has left many lessons about the effects of heavy rainfall, high winds and tidal surges have on freshwater and saltwater fish stocks.

The Inland Fisheries team noted that fish kills often occur in “natural waterbodies surrounded by lands converted from forests to agricultural land,” the LDWF release stated.

Rains carry organic materials from newly eroded lands into the water and overload the waterway’s carrying capacity to process this organic matter, which consume most of the dissolved oxygen in the water and leave little oxygen for the fish.

“Fish kills may also be caused by the rapid mixing of stratified waters or layers of warm, oxygenated water over cooler anoxic (low dissolved oxygen) water. In some instances, the result will be that the water can no longer support underwater life. In the past, tropical storms and hurricanes have caused fish kills in these types of waterbodies,” the release further stated.

To report fish kills, call [phone].