Mile 102.0 - RBD Sixmile Lake: Access to Wax Lake Outlet

102 RBD Sixmile Lake: Access to Wax Lake Outlet

There is a mile-wide opening on the right bank descending that will have some inward flow, and will lead paddlers to Sixmile Lake. At times 10% of the river flow goes this direction. Sixmile lake exits through the Wax Lake Outlet, which leads to the Wax Lake Delta, and could be a final Gulf Coast destination for long distance paddlers.

Wax Lake Outlet: Alternate Route to the Gulf

Most Paddlers will go through Morgan City to reach the Gulf, but please be aware that you could turn right at Myette Point 102 RBD and cross Sixmile Lake to access the Wax Lake Outlet. Check the route on Google Earth. Follow the Wax Lake Outlet to the Wax Lake Delta. This could be a final Gulf Coast destination for long distance paddlers. Your return route could be back up the same outlet, but a more interesting route would be to circle back up the Atchafalaya Delta and end in Morgan City (Intracoastal Waterway/Berwick Boat Ramp is the best location). Or you could paddle west into Bayou Sale Bay and pull out at Burns Point Park (As several expeditions have done in recent years. Hwy 317 South of Centerville, Centerville, LA, 70522, 337-836-9784).

Paradise Regained: The Wax Lake Delta

In appearance, the Calumet Cut (also called the Wax Lake Outlet or the Wax Lake Spillway) is not unlike the thousands of other man-made, straight-shot canals that crisscross southern Louisiana. When the channel was opened just west of Morgan City in 1941, it wasn’t intended to be anything but a large drainage canal. But over the years, it’s become something else. There’s a formidability about the canal that seemed to occupy Sauce. After seven decades receiving flow from the Atchafalaya, it has grown in width, depth, and current. According to a 2005 research paper authored by scientists from the ExxonMobile research department and LSU’s Coastal Studies Institute, the canal dug by Lloyd Sauce’s father was originally forty-four feet deep and forty feet wide. But Sauce pointed to a place upstream, just past a gray houseboat flying the American flag, and said, “They got one place up above the high lines up there, it’s got like about seventy, eighty, ninety foot of water.” It has also grown in width, measuring six hundred feet across in some places. “Every year, this water’s just more and more and more water, just coming through.” In the thirties, no one seemed to wonder what would happen to this water once it mixed with the brackish waters of the Atchafalaya Bay. The unwanted water wasn’t meant to go anywhere except for somewhere else: out of sight and away from the floodwalls and oil infrastructure of Morgan City. But Sauce described extreme changes at the canal’s terminus. “When I was probably about eight years old, the spillway—right out where it ends to the bay—it used to be just the coastline. But now you go down there, and there’s sandbars and trails, and everything’s just flushed out through there. All this water, sand ...” In other words, unlike almost every other place along the Louisiana coast, land is growing, not disappearing, at the base of this old canal. He went to his truck, pulled out a map of the bay, and pointed to where the coastline used to be. Far beneath that line on his map, a delta fanned out, shaped like the canopy of a tree, off into the bay. “It used to be nothing but just straight, whoosh, coastline.” He motioned to chop the delta off the map. The new delta is called the Wax Lake Delta, and over the last forty years it has created twelve thousand acres of land, nearly three times the area of Morgan City. At lower tides, the acreage is even bigger. “We used to hunt coons and stuff on the beach,” said Sauce. “When the tide was out, the water was down, them coons would be out on the beach getting them clam shells, and we’d track ‘em down and shoot ‘em for the fur. And now it ain’t like that. Nothing like that. It looks like this.” He pointed to the forested banks across the channel. (by Wolf E. Staudinger for Country Roads Magazine. Go to Appendix for complete story)