Bayou Benoit
Tucked into the southeast corner of upper St. Martin Parish is the Bayou Benoit Boat Launch. The entrance to the boat launch is accessed from the Bayou Benoit Levee Road, a continuation of the Catahoula Levee Road as it heads south toward Iberia Parish. From the boat launch, you have access to Bayou Benoit, Bayou Chene, Lake Rond and the sprawling network of bayous, both named and unnamed, that continue to be popular with fishermen year-round.
Sac-a-lait, also known as white crappie
The parish recently made improvements to the boat launch, raising the ramp approach and parking area by several feet with well-compacted limestone. This whole area of the parish has undergone drastic changes in the last century. In fact, not far from the boat launch, the ghost town of Bayou Chene—once a thriving and self-sufficient community of five hundred in the Atchafalaya Basin, with a church, a school, a general store and a post office—now lies under twelve feet of sediment and silt. Grand Lake, where the Atchafalaya River in centuries past opened up into a vast interior lake with sandy beaches, has mostly disappeared under sediment as well. While it’s impossible to imagine what the Basin must have been like back then, boating through the more remote areas of Bayou Benoit today, it’s still possible to get a small taste of it.
