Lying face down on a massage table, staring out the window at a fleet of bayboats and watching the captains banter with one another, I try not to focus on the pain climbing up my right calf. It feels like a hot scalpel is carving me up like a leg of lamb. The rat-a-tat-tat of the tattoo gun reminds me of the sound of the old air compressor at my stepdad’s autobody shop when I was a kid. I redirect my thoughts of pain to redfish, the Louisiana bayou and this crazy fishing guide/musician/tattoo artist whose work will live on my body till my last breath.

I met Theophile (pronounced toe-FEEL) Bourgeois IV when he was strumming a guitar in the Grundéns booth at ICAST, the giant tackle trade show held every July in Florida. His name was instantly familiar — you don’t come across a name like that on the regular. I’d read about his father, who had pioneered a unique brand of fishing off Louisiana. The elder Bourgeois was one of those larger-than-life characters who could charm the iciest angler into a warm smile, and wasn’t afraid to push boundaries. He built a charter business south of New Orleans, zigzagging bayous and loading anglers into seaplanes to target seatrout, redfish and drum at the uninhabited Chandeleur Islands about 50 miles offshore. 

Bourgeois IV inherited his father’s quick wit and charm. We hit it off immediately. Before I’d even made it home after the show, I had an invite to Cajun Vista Lodge in my inbox — but it wasn’t a typical invite. Bourgeois said I could come down, do a little fishing, check out his band and maybe get a tattoo.

A Fishing Life Steeped in the Bayou

Echoes of the past weigh heavy as you walk up the front steps of Cajun Vista Lodge in Barataria, Louisiana. The lodge — previously an abandoned, cobweb-infested schoolhouse — is freshly renovated, with sprouting landscaping and a stately glow. The white building is flush with a mix of modern comforts and colonial architecture, but there are ghosts in its bones and hanging on its walls. They aren’t the creepy, voodoo-queen vibes professed to tourists in the French Quarter, about a 30-minute drive north. No, this place is rich in Cajun tradition and fishing tales.

The décor speaks to the lodge’s past. Old fishing rods sculpted into chandeliers. Corrugated tin from long-gone chicken coops installed as wainscotting. Dugout canoes and swamp pirogues hung from the ceiling. Antique outboards sit idle along the main hallway. Tables built of milled cypress pulled from the marsh are used for meals. Fish mounts, alligators, ducks and bucks adorn the main room of the lodge. There’s plenty of bric-a-brac to take in, but my attention is drawn to a photo of a smiling, proud Theophile Bourgeois III standing in the water beside his seaplane with a massive seatrout in his hands. The past is never far behind in this part of the world, but here at Cajun Vista, the soul of this fisherman is omnipresent.

“My whole childhood, all I’ve ever known is if my dad had free time, we were fishing,” Bourgeois says. “My dad was working in a refinery, and he just did not want that future for himself.” He got a loan for a boat and leased a Chevy Suburban to handle transportation. By the early 1990s, he’d built that into a fleet of six boats with six full-time guides, and started a seaplane operation.

The elder Bourgeois had a vision, a dream of spreading Cajun culture and the fishing found in the bayou to the masses. His son harbored a similar love for the outdoors, but his artistic talents pulled him in various directions. “My dad was well-rounded. I call him the Cajun renaissance man,” Bourgeois says. “I call myself that sometimes because we were always interested in a lot of different things. But fishing was his main core deal, whereas fishing for me was like this slice of who I am along with music and art.”

Fishing and guiding were a natural fit for Bourgeois, but tattooing became a major pull after high school. He apprenticed, built up his skills and opened his own shop in New Orleans. “About five years after I started, that’s when I really kind of started to develop my style because I was obsessed, just like [my dad]was with fishing,” he says.

Everything changed on Aug. 18, 2019. Bourgeois was driving the 1978 Lincoln Continental he’d bought for $2,000 to promote his tattoo shop when it threw an alternator belt. The sky was dark and pissing down rain. He limped into an auto parts store, rented a bucket of tools and was looking for a 14-mm socket wrench when his phone rang. It was his father’s girlfriend — she was hysterical, crying and frantic.

“She was like, ‘They can’t find your dad,’ ” Bourgeois says. “He was out that day. There were two planes out, my dad and his buddy Lane.” The weather came up with a roar, and they had to punch their planes through the storm to make it home. The window was small. “We’ll never know what really happened, but Lane made it through. My dad didn’t.” Conditions were so impenetrable that four hours went by before the Coast Guard could send out a helicopter. Somehow, his father’s two passengers survived.

“That was the moment my whole life got turned upside down,” Bourgeois says. “I would come have coffee with him in the morning and see him off on the seaplane. And suddenly, he’s gone. You’re never prepared for something like that. You just adapt and fake it till you make it. You know what they say, man makes plans and God laughs.” There was no time to grieve. Guests were scheduled to arrive. The staff needed the work. The wheels had to keep turning.

A Day in the Marsh

I woke up with a belly still full of Gulf shrimp and jambalaya from dinner. The women who run the kitchen at Cajun Vista don’t go light on the portions. Bourgeois had told me to bring my stretchy pants. He wasn’t kidding. As I made my way to the dining room in the darkness of morning, I was greeted with fried eggs, sausage, grits and toast. I sat at the small counter by the kitchen, listening to the guides poke fun at one another as they made sandwiches.

Most of the morning banter revolved around the conditions. I had flown into Louisiana on the wings of a cold front. The temperature had dropped 20 degrees in 24 hours. The wind was motoring out of the northeast, which drives water out of the bayou. Not ideal. Judging by the layers of clothing the guides wore, I decided to head back to my room and put on another sweatshirt.

Guide Josh Moslay and I boarded Bourgeois’ 24-foot Skeeter with a 300-hp Yamaha. We pulled out of the lodge’s covered docks and hung a right. After that, I couldn’t really tell you where we went. The bayou is a maze of canals, bays and miles of unmarked channels. We were headed for a spot the guides call Blue Point.

Zipping through the marsh grass, I felt a sense of ease pour over me. You could spend a lifetime out here and still uncover new spots as the bayou changes from one year to the next. We motored past another boat. I gave a half-hearted wave from my aft seat but didn’t get one back. Turns out we had lapped a local who was headed to the same spot.

We set up at the end of a canal with water rolling around a point. The other captain posted up behind us for a bit. Unbeknownst to me, our early arrival would kick off a full day of comical texts about one angry captain losing out on access to what he considered “his” spot. All fisheries provoke similar grudges. Funny thing is, the spot didn’t produce much, but listening to the guides sling insults back and forth kept me entertained in the tough conditions.

The waters were churned dark and muddy by the wind. We tossed popping corks with shrimp and artificials. This was not exactly tactical fishing, but it worked. We picked away at small reds and drum. I don’t know if it was the cooler temps, but every fish I hooked seemed to fight harder than its size projected. I landed a keeper flounder, but it was out of season, so we parted ways.

The sky was clear, and we worked our way down a number of canals using the trolling motor until Bourgeois spotted something he wanted clutched to the side of a dead willow tree. We slid the bow under the outstretched branches, which made a scratching sound on the gelcoat like fingernails on a chalkboard. Bourgeois pulled out his pocketknife and cut a large oyster mushroom off the side of the tree. The bayou always provides. 

Perservering

The fall season after the death of Bourgeois’ father was a bit of a fog. “I had to prove we can keep this going,” Bourgeois says. The fishing and Cajun Vista’s hospitality continued to draw a crowd, but as spring came, so did Covid. “Our entire year was just wiped out.” That fall, business finally began to pick back up as more folks took to the outdoors. Then Hurricane Zeta slammed southeast Louisiana and shut them down again. The following spring, Hurricane Ida came ashore, flooding the entire first floor of the lodge with 6 feet of water.

“The bridge was knocked out — I had to borrow a friend’s boat to come and assess the damage,” Bourgeois says. “The first day I stepped foot on this property after Hurricane Ida it was like a bomb went off — utter destruction everywhere. That was the moment I felt the most overwhelmed. Where do you start?”

There was 2 feet of swamp mud in the house. Every family possession was strewn about the property. Feeling defeated, Bourgeois called his grandmother, who was in her 90s at the time. She gave him the same advice she would’ve given his father: “You just put one foot in front of the other. That’s all you can do.”

He could’ve walked away, but that’s not how he was raised. “I want to keep the legacy going,” Bourgeois says. “I’m so proud of the work that my dad put into this. And now I’ve got the opportunity to say, OK, well, how could I improve upon the foundation that my dad set forth?” 

Thus began the effort to raise the lodge. “We flooded so many times that it was covered federally, but that also meant a lot of the work we had already done was undone, so it was another setback,” Bourgeois says. After much time, effort and money, the lodge is better than ever, and the bayou still bears fruit. “You know, if I wanted an easy life, I’d put a for sale sign on this place.” But where’s the fun in that?

Back on the Water

The next morning, I was aboard Capt. Bobby Beroular’s boat. Beroular has fished these waters for more than 30 years, and he’s known the Bourgeois family his whole life. He is a salty character who says whatever comes to mind. The filter stopped working years ago. It’s part of his schtick. Stepping on his boat is kind of like walking into one of those restaurants where the wait staff pokes fun at the customers.

We ran back into the bayou and, despite a sinking barometer, managed a steady pick of redfish, drum and sheepshead. I fished out of the stern, leaving the bow to Beroular’s two longtime clients, Jon Amidei, an executive at Swaggerty’s Sausage, and Paul Cannon, one of his distributors. Each year, they fill the lodge with a large group of employees and customers. They understand Beroular’s reverse charm and willfully signed up to fish with him. They laughed at the insults all day long. When the bite slowed, they showed me photos from years past, with double, triple and quadruple hookups on bull reds. “We always have a blast. We catch a lot, and we laugh a lot,” Cannon says. 

That evening, I skip out on dessert and drive into New Orleans to see Bourgeois’ band, Them Ol’ Ghosts, at the Toulouse Theatre in the French Quarter. It’s billed as a honky tonk review with three other bands and a burlesque show. I stand off to the side, sipping whiskey and Coke, thinking the caffeine might sustain me after two long days on the water. My face is windburned to the point that I feel the chap on my lips as I cheer.

I watch Bourgeois, wearing a gold blazer, work the crowd. He exudes the same genuine charm in the venue that he bestows on his charter clients. He’s a natural host, just like his dad. The opening bands perform well, and I’m enjoying the scene. When it’s time for Them Ol’ Ghosts, Bourgeois takes his spot center stage, guitar in hand. He thanks the crowd, many of whom are friends and family, and they kick off their set. The band has an Americana rock vibe mixed with some Southern blues. Bourgeois sings with a voice full of heart and a twinge of pain. He’s in his element. 

“The music and the art is what really speaks to my soul,” Bourgeois says. “But going out on the water, there’s poetry in that, too. There’s so much beauty in just being out there, and that informs much of my creative process.”

I scan the room as Bourgeois and his bandmates crank up the energy. I see smiles and pumping fists, much like the reaction you see from an angler who just caught a bull red — all thanks to the hard work of a Cajun renaissance man.  

For more information on Cajun Vista Lodge visit neworleansfishing.com.