In March of 2015, after months of emails and incompatible calendars, a few free days on Capt. Greg Dini’s calendar agreed with everyone’s calendar. Our plan was to film Greg fly fishing in his home waters for a project we’d been planning called Through the Guides. More precisely, he had exactly two days for us. Two days, one angling and one interview, to shoot his entire segment of the film. Not ideal by any means, but we had to make it work because Greg was leaving New Orleans to guide in Florida for the spring and summer tarpon season in one week. Finding free days on Greg’s guiding calendar is like hunting blue quail in the South Texas brush country…it’s difficult and requires a lot of leg-work, but when it all comes together, it’s rewarding. (Pro Tip: if you mention a quail hunt with good dogs, you may discover that his calendar becomes a little more flexible.) I asked if one day of filming would be enough for him to put the boat on enough fish to get sufficient footage. Confidently, he immediately said, “Absolutely. We can get on anything you want.” With confidence like that, what else can you do but accept his word as cold, hard fact. We jumped on what we could get.
Months of emails and texts preceded the trip. When our trip was within spitting distance, we packed bags and production gear and turned the truck East on I-10 towards Delacroix Island from Austin, TX through heavy rain. You've probably never heard of Delacroix unless you’re a Bob Dylan fan (hear his reference to the small spit of land in the song, Tangled Up in Blue) or you closely followed some of unfortunate events to plague the area in the last decade - Hurricane Katrina and the BP Oil Spill. Delacroix was hit hard by both disasters. To the casual observer, the remnants of the oil spill seem to be cleaned up - crab boats and pots fill the waterways, and a little further East near Breton Sound Marina, the oyster barges move in and out of the barge channels consistently, and the 50-pound bags of fresh gulf oysters pile up in the refrigerated trucks quickly each afternoon. The leftovers from Katrina that dodged the clean-up effort, however, remain piled up in the thick tangle of trees and vines that line the waterways. Mattresses, remnants of mobile homes, and buildings are hidden like oversized Easter eggs. Foundations scraped bare by tidal surge and heavy equipment clean-up efforts dot the sides of the roads. It’s a bizarre contradiction of life with such clear and stunning reminders of disaster playing along side a functioning coastal community and economy.