• By JOE MACALUSO
• Advocate Outdoors writer
• Published: Jun 20, 2010 - Page: 14C

In normal years, the only Louisiana parade in Washington comes during the always highly anticipated Mardi Gras Ball.

This ain’t a normal year.

The parade of Louisianans to our nation’s capital in the last weeks has been to testify before one or another Congressional committee about the effects of still-spewing oil off our coast.

David Cresson was in that group last week. Louisiana’s executive director of the Coastal Conservation Association pleaded a case for recreational fishermen. He said he told the House Natural Resources subcommittee that habitat restoration should be a priority.

“Because our estuaries are so rich, there’s no doubt that this catastrophe will affect years of spawning and years of juvenile (fish) recruitment into our marshes,” Cresson said. “Habitat rebuilding, the building of reefs, will help offset some of these losses.”

CCA-Louisiana has partnered with Wildlife and Fisheries and private companies, some oil companies, in building reefs from Lake Pontchartrain west to Calcasieu Lake.

Cresson said most of the reefs have been built with recycled materials like discarded concrete from road and bridges. There’s also a move to enlist concrete companies across the state to use their daily discarded concrete, poured into forms on company property, for reef-building projects.

Cresson also outlined a bolder step, the construction of a marine fish hatchery along our coast. He said Wildlife and Fisheries will have a formal hatchery proposal later this month.

“We believe a hatchery will be able to produce 25-to-30 million fingerlings each year,” Cresson said.

Presumably these are 1-2 inch-long speckled trout, but could include other species.

“We cannot afford to lose one year of the spawn much less the prospect of losing more than one year to rebuild (fish) populations along our coast,” Cresson said.

Another 48 hours
Wasn’t it great that last weekend our country gave British Petroleum 48 hours to come up with a plan to control the oil flowing from the blown-out well off our coast? Isn’t that about six weeks too late?

With oil coming ashore along more than half of our coastline, and that oil taking as much as six weeks to find its way to our beaches, marsh and interior bays, oil gushing today could show up sometime in early August. With a projected late-July date for completion of the relief well —what a relief that will be, if it works — that means leaking oil will affect the entire spawning period of the species we seek the most along our coast. By the time the oil is expected to stop gushing into the Gulf, speckled trout and  and many other species, will have gone through an entire spawning season under an oil threat.