Traces of the oil slick spilling from the failed BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico began to reach the Breton-Chandeleur Island chain, Gov. Bobby Jindal reported early Tuesday, but clean-up crews and others were having trouble finding it.

After sending several boats to the area, the Coast Guard said it could not confirm that the oil had actually made landfall.

Small patches of thick, red-colored oil inside large areas of light oil sheen were spotted on the inshore side the barrier island chain drifting west toward St. Bernard marshes Tuesday afternoon on a flight by The Times-Picayune.

However, newspaper photojournalist Chris Granger said he could see no concentrations of oil on the barrier islands' beaches, currently a key nesting sight for a wide array of shore and water birds.
Chris Granger / The Times-PicayuneA shark, bottom right, confronts a line of oil about two to three miles northwest of the Chandeleur Islands in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday.
Granger and Dicky Toups, chief pilot of Southern Seaplane, said the light sheen was in long bands as wide as a half-mile and one mile long. The thicker patches of red oil inside the sheens were about 20 yards wide and 100 yards long. The entire slick was just west of Gosier and Grand Gosier islands in Breton Sound, about 20 miles east of the edges of the marsh.

The sightings came toward the end of a day of confusing reports about just where oil had come ashore.

Earlier Jindal announced oil had definitely come ashore on the sensitive barrier island chain, but BP clean-up crews later said they found no oil on several trips to the site.

The reprieve from any significant oil landfall did not lessen the flurry of activities centering around the oil spill Tuesday. While work continued on a relief well to plug the flow of oil beneath the surface and boats resumed skimming the slick, construction of a containment chamber to capture some of the oil as it flows from the well was being wrapped up.