Showing off Annual events set for weekend

• By JOE MACALUSO
• Advocate outdoors writer
• Published: Mar 2, 2008

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Two major events will make the Capital City area the center of the outdoors world this week.

The 29th-annual Louisiana Sportsmen’s Show, once believed to be another Hurricane Katrina victim, is making its third appearance at the Lamar Dixon Expo Center in Gonzales. The show runs Thursday through Sunday on the expansive Expo Center’s grounds.

Saturday, the Red Stick Fly Fisheries holds its annual Red Stick Day at the Waddill Outdoors Education Center off North Flannery Road.

Mixed in are as many as a dozen local chapter banquets for the Coastal Conservation Association and National Wild Turkey Federation.

Still, it’s the “show” and the “day” that will get folks off the water and out of the fields, forests and swamps.

When Katrina put the Louisiana Superdome out of commission, outdoors folks in the southeastern parishes — even some southern Mississippi counties — feared the show’s run was over.

Show owner Bob Del Giorno admitted he was like hundreds of thousands of others caught in the brutal storm’s aftermath. The transplanted Yankee had missed the devastating storms of the past like Betsy and Camille. He said the shock lasted for days.

Then, he knew what the show meant if not from his and others pocketbooks then from the calls he took from folks asking about the its future.

So, he found the Expo Center, about an hour’s drive from the Superdome. Three years later, Del Giorno and his partners are ready to open the biggest Sportsmen’s Show ever.

“We love the place (Expo Center),” Del Giorno said. “It’s open. It’s outside. You have a nice feeling because you feel like you’re outdoors. You’re not cramped up indoors.

“Even better (than the Superdome), we have a lot of room to spread out, to shoot skeet, to run the motocross, the display boats.

“It just seems like it’s a happier place.”

The show is expanding into Thursday and Friday afternoons, hours when lighter traffic through the buildings and along the fairways will allow more one-on-one attention from the fishing and hunting guides and outfitters.