Family and friends know how special each and every Thanksgiving is to me because of my holiday visit here in 1975.

Someone was guiding me, I’m sure, to the heart of the Teche Area for the first time in my life. While here on a week’s vacation from The Kansas City Star, I was fortunate to meet two great local outdoorsmen, Marc Buford and Jimmy Lacour, both no longer with us and who I miss a lot. 

Since that Thanksgiving, and the subsequent career move a month later to New Iberia, the number of great outdoorsmen, great people from all walks of life, I met and befriended as an outdoors writer, a sports writer and a senior news editor here at the newspaper has multiplied. That’s why I’m oh-so thankful this week.

The reminder is with me every day on the water, whether it’s the breathtaking swamp scenery inside the Atchafalaya Basin or the waters in and around Vermilion Bay. It’s God’s Country, for sure.

That I can share it all with my wife, June, my two sons, Joshua and Jacob, and my friends makes it so much more meaningful. That I can share your stories, my stories, with you and other readers makes this heaven-on-earth precious.

We truly are in the Sportsman’s Paradise. That’s enough to be thankful for. Generations of local fishermen and hunters probably agree.

Buford and Lacour introduced me to the nation’s last great overflow swamp on a bass fishing trip the day before Thanksgiving 42 years ago. As if it was yesterday, I remember it was bitterly cold and sleeting when we launched the aluminum boat from Bayou Benoit Boat Landing near Coteau Holmes.

They each caught five 2- to 3-pound bass on black plastic lizards in a cut off Bayou Crook Chene. I later learned about the historical significance of that bayou and how integral it was to people around here.

After moving here, I spent quite a few hours at Buford’s bait shop, which isn’t there now, on the west side of the West Atchafalaya Basin Protection Levee. And I went fishing for bass and sac-a-lait often with one or both of them as they showed me around the Atchafalaya Basin.

Other considerate fishermen did the same, opening my eyes to the beauty of both the swamp and, in time, the Vermilion Bay area.

One of the most memorable Thanksgiving days here was one in the 1980s. Kevin Suit of New Iberia took me sac-a-lait fishing on a cold, damp day and we limited out in Big Dogleg in Lake Fausse Pointe. The photo of those slabs on a stringer stretching from shoulder to shoes stays in my mind.

I will savor those and many other moments from a little more than four decades this week, Thanksgiving week, indeed.

DON SHOOPMAN is outdoors editor of The Daily Iberian.