The last stretch of LA 56
Chauvin is a bayou community in lower Terrebonne Parish, built along the banks of Bayou Petit Caillou. Every spring its fishing families take their boats down the bayou for the Blessing of the Fleet, a boat procession and community Mass that honors the people who make their living on the water. Below Chauvin the road keeps going a little farther, into Cocodrie, and then it simply stops.
At the very end sits LUMCON, the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. The Legislature enacted it into law in 1979, and its first scientists worked out of five trailers in the marsh at the end of Highway 56: a library, the offices, a zooplankton lab, a benthos lab and a kitchen that doubled as the dormitory. Ground was broken on a permanent building in 1983, staff moved in during 1986, and in 1996 it was renamed the W. J. DeFelice Marine Center.
Anyone can walk in. The Marine Center is open for self-guided tours from 8 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon, seven days a week. There are aquaria with local animals, exhibits on Louisiana's marine side, an observation tower with a view over the marsh and a boardwalk around a pond for birdwatching. Groups can book longer trips out into the salt marsh, the bays and the islands near Cocodrie, which is the same country the fishing guides work.
Back up the bayou in Chauvin, the Chauvin Sculpture Garden fills a lot at 5337 Bayouside Drive with the work of outsider artist Kenny Hill. Nicholls State University's Center for Bayou Studies looks after it, it is free and open from 8 to 5, and in April 2026 its sculptures were unveiled again after three years of repair and strengthening following Hurricane Ida.
Trout country
Cocodrie is a launch into Terrebonne Bay and the water beyond it. Louisiana Sportsman has reported guides out of Cocodrie working the wellheads in Lake Pelto and Lake Barre with live shrimp or minnows under popping corks and slip corks, and crossing the bay to fish both the Gulf side and the bay side of Timbalier and Last Island when the weather allows. In one late April report a guide said the trout had already moved to their summer spots on the platforms, wellheads and islands, and his clients were boating fish of 18 to 20 inches.
The crossing is the catch. A south wind is workable on the open bay, but the same guide warned against heading across when it blows from the east. On the back side of the islands he looks for oyster reefs you cannot see from the surface, plus points and pockets in the marsh. Shrimp boats work these waters too, so the dinner menu down here is rarely more than a few miles from where it was caught.
