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Teche handicap-accessible docks dedicated

ST. MARTINVILLE (AP) — The national water trail along Bayou Teche has four new handicap-accessible floating docks for canoers and kayakers, and two of them will be dedicated in the coming week. There’s one in each parish through which the 135-mile-long bayou flows.

Those at St. Martinville, Charenton and Loreauville have a boat slip at one end with two overhead handrails so paddlers on the Bayou Teche Paddle Trail can pull themselves straight up from their boats, rather than leaning over to haul themselves out over one side.

The other end is angled so debris and floating plants drift down the bayou with the current rather than piling up against the dock.

The Port Barre dock is larger than the other three because it’s the starting point for the annual Tour du Teche paddle race.

It doesn’t have a boat slip but does have a gangway handrail, transition plates and some other features to for safer and easier wheelchair access, said Jennifer Ritter Guidry of the University of Louisiana.

The dock at St. Martinville will be dedicated at 2 p.m. Monday, and the one at Port Barre (“Barry”) at 10 a.m. Tuesday.

A ribbon-cutting was held last month at Loreauville. A date has not yet been set at Charenton, but Guidry said it will be sometime in August, after some trail improvements are completed..

Guidry says the Federal Highway Administration provided $83,400 for the docks through its Recreational Trails Program.

She’s with the university’s Center for Louisiana Studies, which partnered with the Teche Ecology, Culture and History Education Project, or TECHE Project, and another nonprofit, the Acadiana Resource Conservation and Development Council, to create the Bayou Teche Paddle Trail.

The center also administered this grant.

A fifth floating dock, at Breaux Bridge, has the same boat slip design as those at St. Martinville, Charenton and Loreauville. The TECHE Project got a separate grant to build it.

ST. MARY NOW

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