re: Gating canals in houma area

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I've never paddled past a sign. but there don't really need to be signs for it to be a trespass. if none, that's where the officer discretion comes in. those guys do not want to give you a ticket, but if you're being an a-hole obviously trespassing on posted property, they will.

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I agree with you but the point I'm trying to make is, officer discretion aside, there is no difference. Trespassing is trespassing, the law doesn't make a distinction between accidental and intentional. There isn't a level of trespassing you must meet to get a ticket.

The problem at it's core is the ability to protect yourself from accidentally becoming a criminal. The nice guy who gave me written permission a few years ago could have pressed charges just as easily. I had zero reason to believe the area I was in was private. Hundreds of hours of research and never once did I find any evidence of it being private property, it turned out to be but if I couldn't find out how is someone with less resources supposed to know? So where does that leave us? What about my children?

Let's look at all of Lafourche parish. We have PAC that is about 30k acres, a lot of which is in Terrebonne parish. We have Forenation islands. Some public land north of HWY 1 up to around the Southwestern canal. That's it as far as shallow water fishing goes. You can sink shite in deep canals for trout or reds but if you want to sight cast shallow water, that's all you got.

If we go a little further west, we have Terrebonne parish. That has a little sliver of state land that's about 1,500 acres and that's it outside of what little PAC crosses the parish line. That's all for Terrebonne. The whole parish which is home to roughly half a MILLION acres of marsh.

St Bernard Parish has Biloxi WMA, and nothing else. You could pole banks of a few lakes or canals but you can not enter the marsh. Delacroix is a fricking mess. They have lost tens of thousands of acres of land, all of it private, all of the restoration being funded by the public. Most of it because of the land corps exploration and transportation canals, which they profited from the destruction.

This is just the tip of the ice berg.