If you are looking for kayak locations on the North Shore in Louisiana, you might consider the Tangipahoa river. Here are the details from two different trips. Both of these were in early June.

Lee’s Landing to Rice Bayou (upstream)

Lee’s Landing is just South of Robert, LA. Here’s a map.

I like to go early (before it gets hot and it seems like you hear more birds) so the kayak was in the water around 7:00 AM. The boat ramp wasn’t crowded (at all), but the river was quite high.

Looking at the NOAA river data (https://water.noaa.gov/gauges/robl1), the flow rate was at about 2 KCFS (whatever those units mean). I wanted to go downstream, but I figured upstream would be safer in case the current was too fast. My goal was to check out Rice Bayou.

The nice thing about upstream from this point is that there is very little boat traffic (most boats are going downstream towards the lake). But from all the rain, you can see how muddy the water was.

Despite the high water, there were a couple of good beaches. This first one was about 80 percent the way to the bayou.

Oh, the other nice thing is that there are almost no houses on this part and there are no nearby roads, so you just hear nature stuff.

Right before you get to Rice Bayou, there’s a large house on the right. The bayou then goes off to the left. Oh, there’s a pretty nice beach at the just at the junction between the bayou and where the river keeps going. You can tell it’s a bayou because the water isn’t flowing so fast and looks less muddy.

I didn’t go all the way back into the bayou—maybe I will try that when it gets cooler in the Fall. Overall, it’s a nice paddle trip. I saw just one alligator but I did see a nice sized gar. Oh, time—I forgot about time. It took about 40 minutes to paddle (pedal) upstream to the bayou and 25 minutes to get back. I think I was going pretty fast so with that current it could take even longer to get there for others. Who knows?

DownStream to Black Bayou

After a few days with less rain, the water level was lower with a flow rate of about 0.7 KCFS. So I decided to head downstream and check out Black Bayou.

The downstream trip from Lee’s has more man-made structures (houses, channels, power lines) but it’s still nice. There’s also way more boat traffic. Here’s a guy that was fishing.

On the way down, there were no beaches—that’s no fun. It took about 25-30 minutes to get to Black Bayou (the trip back from the beginning of the bayou was about 45 minutes).

This bayou is really nice and long. Very little current and zero boats when I was there.

This bayou was much better than Rice Bayou except for all the boats on the downstream part of the river.