By Maggie McGuane | April/May 2009 | Features

Louisiana's Last Shrimpers

Facing a tough economy, high fuel prices, and competition from overseas, shrimpers are watching their life's work disappear in their wakes 

As if the tragedy of losing their way of life weren’t enough, Cajuns have come to accept that their home is disappearing as well. Coastal erosion claims a couple of football fields’ worth of Louisiana’s wetlands every day. Insular communities throughout the bayou are steadily sinking into the salt water of the Gulf, and larger towns like Golden Meadow are equally aware that they’re next. The Mississippi River, tamed by a series of dams and levies, no longer floods. The floods once provided critical deposits of silt along the bayou. Worse, Louisiana’s oil industry has sliced and scarred the marsh with thousands of buried gas lines, killing the native grass’s roots systems, which have held in the soil for centuries. As a result, the Gulf gains acreage every day and Cajuns lose ground not just economically and culturally, but physically.

A Day’s Haul
I am flicking a crawfish skull off theside of the boat when Captain Brockhoeft looks over to me and says, “If you’re gonna be on a shrimp boat, you better learn to pick shrimp.”

The nets are hoisted, and the back of the boat is filled with our haul. Suddenly the picking table is covered in a huge wriggling, twitching mound of shrimp and bycatch. Assorted fish flop and gasp. Crabs snap their claws in the air while others skitter across the table in search of water. Catfish eye me menacingly. During a ten-second demonstration, during which I realize this is a gloveless sport, Captain Brockhoeft scoops up a handful of large white shrimp, with a shrimp tucked under each finger, and plops them into a big plastic bucket. At fifty cents a pound, there’s no use bothering with the smaller brown shrimp.

“Watch out for catfish,” Captain Brockhoeft reminds me over his shoulder. Catfish will happily deliver a mind-numbing sting, but it’s the shrimp’s large sword-like antennae, jutting from their foreheads, that intimidate me the most. With a wooden rake, I quickly separate out a smaller pile and pick the large white shrimp as fast as I can. Captain Brockhoeft used all his fingers at once. In the beginning, I’m not so nimble, but ever aware that this is a test, I rake, grab, and drop as quickly as I can.

My concern for the bycatch slows me down. It’s hard to ignore how much sea life is thrown overboard in the process of shrimping—on average in Louisiana, there are four pounds of bycatch per pound of shrimp. Needless to say, huge bottom-scraping nets are indiscriminate. Attempts to make the industry more fish, and turtle, friendly have been met by much protest from shrimpers who argue that the federally mandated safety devices, particularly the Turtle Exclusion Devices, or TEDs, also let out their fair share of shrimp. As I delicately nudge crabs off the side of the boat and try not to chop the fish in two with the rake, I catch a look of disdain flicking across the captain’s face. I don’t want to lose ground with him, so before long I’m racking and picking like a maniac, tossing everything else overboard haphazardly.

“Does your back hurt yet?” calls Captain Brockhoeft.

“No,” I tell him.

He turns his attention back to the hoisted nets and says under his breath, “It will.”

By the end of two pushes, the boat is full with a few hundred pounds of iced-down shrimp. We head in, the boat loaded down with our catch. Brockhoeft will bring the shrimp to Jules Nunez’s distribution center in Lafitte to sell. It’s an impressive sight, thousands of perfect shrimp glistening in the sun atop heaps of ice. I mention to the captain that he must be pleased. “This? This’ll barely pay for our diesel.”

Sinking Profits
The future of the American shrimper comes down to simple mathematics. Diesel fuel costs over four dollars a gallon. A trawler can easily burn a few thousand bucks’ worth of gas in one trip out to the Gulf waters and back. Shrimp fetches fifty cents a pound, so even a huge haul of shrimp on a big boat will bring in only a few thousand dollars. Add to the equation the price of ice, the crew’s wages, money spent on equipment upkeep, and the final numbers are distinctly red. The outcome’s not much different for smaller vessels. They use less gas, but they also hold less shrimp.