Shrimping in Acadiana

During the off-season, Jimmie Leger and Carolyn Landry drive to Intercoastal City to perform regular maintenance on their boat the Carolyn Sue.

We all have dreams in life,” Timmy Schouest Jr. said as he stood beside the Smokin Joe, his 49-year-old shrimp boat docked along Bayou Carlin in Delcambre. Schouest’s dreams began in the 1960s, in Golden Meadow, where he grew up as heir to four generations of commercial fishermen.

As a child, Schouest thought of this life on the water as a gift. Still, his father framed family tradition as a choice. “You can make $1,000 a day and be miserable,” he remembered his father telling him, “or you can make $300 a week and be happy as a frog. What are you gonna do?”

Schouest said, “I’m going shrimping.”

Half a century later, he recalled his father’s response: “Then you’re gonna be happy in life.”

Seventeen miles northwest of Delcambre, near Maurice, Cheryl Granger sat at a picnic table outside her kitchen door, where, a week before Christmas, she fielded seafood orders. Throughout the afternoon, the Granger’s Seafood phones jingled, one after another, with Granger and others answering questions about shrimp, crabmeat and crawfish, while cars pulled off Placide Road, away from the sugarcane field and across the gravel to the table. Some had already preordered their holiday seafood. Others arrived to see what remained in the deep freezers that keep the family business thriving between seasons when Cheryl’s husband, Albert Granger, isn’t working the 55-foot Miss Brittany G., the shrimp boat named for their daughter.

Albert Granger grew up in the Atchafalaya Basin. After finishing high school, he made his living working in the oil fields. On days off, he spent his time crawfishing in the Basin. When he and Cheryl married and moved to Maurice, she worried about how her husband would adapt to her hometown. “It’s hard to take a man out of the Basin,” she said.

During their early years together, Albert would return there to crawfish, often leaving home at 2 a.m. Then, in 1988, he began to see the possibilities of the world that opened not far from his new back door. He and Cheryl bought a shrimp boat.

“Our plans, me and Al, when our kids were younger, we were going to work the boat together,” said Cheryl. “It didn’t work out that way.”

On an early trip, she and Albert had been out for three days, shrimping in Vermilion Bay. Or at least Albert had been shrimping in Vermilion Bay. “I had been sleeping the whole time,” Cheryl said. “The water all around, and the sound of all that water, I find it too relaxing.” Now, she stays home, running Granger Seafood on the family property. During shrimp season, they sell what comes in on the Miss Brittany G. Out of season, they sell frozen and fresh seafood, including soft-shell crabs, soft-shell shrimp, and fileted alligator tail.

Seated across from Cheryl Granger, Carolyn Landry of CJL Seafood recalled her own first trip on a shrimp boat. She and Jimmie Leger Sr., CJL’s other half, had their own plans to work together on the 38-foot skiff Carolyn Sue, which he named for her. “For a long time, I was too excited to notice it,” she said of her first outing, “but I got seasick.”

Like Cheryl Granger, Landry now stays home to run CJL Seafood, taking orders while Leger works on the boat. There are times, though, when he needs her onboard the Carolyn Sue as a deckhand, the position where his own life as a shrimper started 49 years ago.

For Leger, as for Timmy Schouest Jr. — Leger’s former brother-in-law and one-time deckhand — shrimping seemed hereditary, more vocation than job. Leger’s father worked for Exxon. On days off, he shrimped out of Intercoastal City. He eventually retired from one but not the other. Shrimpers, it seems, don’t retire so much as go on hiatus. As a boy, Leger would sometimes skip school to join his father on the boat, the two working side by side. When he graduated from high school, he gave himself the weekend to relax. Then on Monday, he started full-time work as a shrimper.

Nearly 50 years later, Leger still shrimps out of Intercoastal City. He works the same places he did with his father, now with a lifetime’s knowledge of South Louisiana’s waterways and those places with names that only fishermen recall, the kind, as Melville writes in “Moby-Dick,” that are “not down in any map; true places never are.”

Leger bought his first shrimp boat when he was 18. “I knew nothing about working a boat,” he admitted, seated across from Granger and Landry. Owning a boat, however, meant abandoning excuses. You either learn fast, or you get out. And since getting out meant having to work on land, Leger learned to feel his way through the maze of South Louisiana’s waterways. He learned to patch nets. He learned to overhaul engines. He learned to dive, cutting ropes out of wheels and working to clean propellors — his own and others — while at sea. He lived inside the rhythms of the shrimp seasons along the Gulf Coast. Out of Intercoastal City, he passed the mouth of the Mississippi River. Over four days and three nights, he worked his way to Key West, Florida. From there, he followed the shrimp — pink in the eastern Gulf, white in the central, brown in the western — all the way to Brownsville, Texas, only to soon begin the rotation again.

Then, after 20 years of this life, Leger needed a change. He wanted variation, something other than a flat and steady horizon. He decided on mountains and settled in Wyoming, where he found work in an above-ground coal mine.

“But shrimping was in his blood,” Landry said. To that, Leger nodded, a brief acknowledgement that seemed to suggest he had no better explanation.

“You can’t take the Cajun out of Cajun,” Cheryl Granger said as she turned to take another order.

“This is what he wanted to do, to come back and work harder,” Landry said, her tone a mixture of disbelief and respect.

Leger has now been back in Louisiana working as a shrimper for six years. But this, he said, will probably be his final season in the industry. What had once been both livelihood and lifeblood for him, the Grangers, Schouest and many other Louisiana shrimpers, has become dire. Over the years, they understood friends’ decisions to retire from the industry as they aged or developed health problems. Now, though, they’re seeing something different. Shrimpers are getting out of the industry for other reasons, among them the rising cost of fuel, new regulations and the low market value of local shrimp. Another trend they consider terminal for the future of shrimping in Louisiana: Fewer young shrimpers are starting out, and those who do, such as Albert and Cheryl Granger’s son, Albert Jr., often leave after several years to seek more stable work.

“How can young shrimpers start now and raise a family without having a second income?” Leger asked. Several decades ago, when he, Schouest and the Grangers started in the industry, the question would have been unthinkable.

“The years now are not good like they used to be,” Granger said.

Granger’s sentiment echoed something that Timmy Schouest Jr. said in Delcambre as he stepped onto the Smokin Joe and pointed out yachts where shrimp boats once docked: “This is gonna be a dead industry in 10 years. Mark my words.”

The good years, Schouest and many other Louisiana shrimpers say, were the 1970s and 1980s, a golden era when the price for fuel and ice remained low and steady, tropical storms and hurricanes were less persistent and severe, fishermen hadn’t navigated through the worst marine oil spill in history, and prices of shrimp held strong. As years passed, while other prices climbed, the market value of shrimp, unlike that of crawfish, failed to rise with the times.

That’s just the beginning. Decades ago, shrimpers needed only one license. Now, they need separate licenses for each net, as well as a license for a commercial boat, and another for a vessel. Each license comes with an annual price tag. There’s another sore spot, one that pervades conversations among commercial shrimpers: the turtle excluder devices, or TEDs — grids made of metal bars that fit into trawl nets — that they’ve been required to have since 1987 to prevent sea turtles from getting trapped. Conservationists applaud this law that requires a TED for each net on a shrimp boat. Many shrimpers, on the other hand, complain that the devices are yet another costly expense and setback to their livelihood, one that interferes with netting and can reduce their catch by up to 20 percent.

Fuel, ice, storms, oil spills, regulations and there’s yet another worry that punctuates almost every conversation among shrimpers: Imported shrimp. With their rising expenses and the stabilized market value for Louisiana shrimp, many complain that trade regulations make it too difficult to compete with the prices of farm-raised shrimp. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, farm-raised shrimp comprise more than 50 percent of global shrimp production. More than 90 percent of all shrimp consumed in the United States is imported from farms in India, Indonesia, Ecuador, Vietnam and Thailand. Because these farms are typically unregulated, imported shrimp tested in this country have contained traces of antibiotics and pesticides.

As Emma Christopher Lirette writes in her 2022 book, “Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers,” “If we try to measure the success of the fishery by the value of its landings or the amount of new commercial licenses or the market share of the products, we will find that wild-caught shrimp is becoming a niche industry incapable of supporting the people who work in it.”

For Louisiana shrimpers, things turned worse in August 2022, when the United States signed a new trade agreement to increase shrimp imports from Ecuador.

At Granger Seafood, Leger said, “Until a regulation limits the amount we can import to America, the business will continue to die.”

Louisiana shrimpers have no doubt that the high quantity and low cost of imported shrimp equates financial crisis. They also agree on another matter.

“You can’t beat Louisiana shrimp,” Cheryl Granger said.

“The taste … ,” Leger said, aware that he didn’t need to complete the thought.

“They’re sweeter here,” Granger said.

“It’s the brackish water and iodine,” Leger explained. “Those imported shrimp, they’re rubbery. They don’t have flavor. All you can say is that you’re eating a shrimp.”

In Delcambre, Schouest’s companion and deckhand, Macie Kemp, spoke of how she prefers to eat shrimp on the stern of the Smokin Joe, or what she calls her back porch. “I like them straight out of the water and into the pot. That’s the best.” Aboard the Miss Brittany G., Albert Granger likes to bake shrimp, shells on, in a black iron skillet, letting them cook in their own juices, while the thought of fried shrimp makes Leger smile.

Talk of eating shrimp, among shrimpers, is one of the swiftest ways to divert conversation from the current crises. There have been other times, though, when shrimpers believed the end was near.

In the 1980s, Schouest’s father tried to convince him that it was time to get out. Now, Schouest wonders if he should have taken heed. He estimates that he earns less money today than he did in the 1970s, the same decade he quit school, at age 14, to shrimp with his father and, later, his brother. The Schouests eventually earned enough to buy a bigger boat. Their plan was to work enough to run three boats at the same time. But fuel prices climbed. Profits seeped into repairs. The bank reclaimed the new boat. “We all have dreams in life,” Schouest said for the second time. “That was ours. If it had turned out good, you wouldn’t see me here today. I’d be on a beach in South America drinking tequila.”

Eventually, he found work as a deckhand for Leger. They were together in 1989, that period when Leger trolled the breadth of the Gulf of Mexico, his boat like a metronome between Key West and Brownsville. That year, they were among the shrimpers who protested the new law requiring that their nets contain turtle excluder devices. Schouest speaks of his participation in the blockade at Aransas Pass much as hippies talk about being present on the morning Jimi Hendrix played “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock.

In was 1989, the year of the blockade, that marked the end of what some shrimpers cite as the final era when deckhands could support their families through seasonal shrimping alone. Now, many who once made their living as deckhands seek steadier work in the oilfields and other industries, where they receive guaranteed pay rather than a percentage of a boat’s profits. This change means an additional stress for captains: Lacking reliable workers, they must sometimes hire multiple deckhands each season.

“It’s dying,” Leger said of the industry. “It’s almost dead.”

Granger added another point: “You don’t have health insurance.”

“Who wants to get into a business that can’t be profitable?” Landry asked.

Decades ago, Don Guidry was among the many who left shrimping for steadier work on land. He became a boat builder. Now retired, he has resumed shrimping. This time, however, he’s not concerned about profit. “I believe in the barter system. I make enough to pay my fuel, and the rest I give away,” he said at his dock in Delcambre, where he’s rebuilding a 62-year old boat. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Don’t step there, there, there or there.”

The boat is a perfect example of another regular expense that shrimpers must consider. In the best scenario, Leger said, shrimpers put their boats on a dry dock every two years. There’s regular wear and tear on propellors. Anodes need to be changed. Bottoms need cleaning.

“If you’ve got to hire a mechanic for everything, you’ll never make it,” Leger said. “You have to be a jack of all trades.”

That’s one reason Guidry has decided to do the work himself. Another is that he feels rooted to the work. “I was four years old on the deck of a boat,” he said, remembering his childhood in Golden Meadow, shrimping with his mother, brother and stepfather. In the 1960s, the family caught seafood and served it in their restaurant in Cut Off, where Guidry started shucking oysters at age seven. One night, after cutting his hand with an oyster knife, he went to his mother so she could help him stop the bleeding. “She took one look at me and said, ‘Go finish opening them oysters.’” This moment previewed the life that awaited him as a commercial fisherman.

At the start of shrimping seasons in the 1960s, Guidry remembered as many as 60 kids skipping school to help their families on boats. “I was 11, 12 years old working on a boat,” he said. “They paid me like a man.” At 16, he quit school to work as a deckhand. At 19, his uncle gave him the boat that he captained for nearly two decades. Then one day, he calculated that he had spent three-fourths of his life on the water. “I decided right then that I’m not sleeping on a boat anymore.” Now, though, he spends his time working on his boat, talking about it, admiring it from his dock or taking it on the water.

Conversations among shrimpers often revolve around boats, their own and others’. They admire. They admonish. One line carried on the wind in Delcambre, drifting down from the morning activity along the dock near Ocean Harvest Seafood: “I don’t know how that boat stays afloat.” Across from the banter, several submerged boats lined Bayou Carlin. The speaker’s gaze, however, suggested that he had a working vessel in mind.

Schouest has his own theories. “A pretty boat don’t make money,” he said. “The way I look at life, I don’t have to impress anybody. A boat makes you stay on your toes. If you know your boat, your boat talks to you. You feel it with your feet, your hands, the first sign something is wrong.”

At that, Macie Kemp stepped onto the Smokin Joe. Kemp grew up in Bayou Sorrel and spent much of her earlier life crawfishing and hoop net fishing in the Atchafalaya Basin. When she first met Schouest, all she wanted to do was take a ride on his boat. “Now, this boat don’t leave without me,” she said. They live part-time on the boat and work together for five days at a stretch, returning to Delcambre to sell their catch from the dock. In the early morning light, squinting at the Smokin Joe, Kemp said, “I love what I do.”

Her sentiment sparked Schouest’s memories about his earliest days as a shrimper. He recalled his decision to quit school, at age 14. “I told my dad, ‘I ain’t learning nothing. I think I’m a man now. I want to go work on the boat with you’.”

His father gave him a chance. Through the days, they worked, with Schouest pursuing his earliest dream, but at night, when he crawled into his bunk, those dreams turned to nightmares. Fifty years later, he can’t shake them. “The nightmares were so bad that I wanted to go back to school,” he said. He never told his father. Given another chance, he would still stay silent. He wouldn’t do much else differently, either.

“I don’t feel right if I’m not on my boat,” he said. “That’s my life. I can do anything I want — construction, carpentry. But the only way y’all gonna keep me from shrimping is if you put me in the hospital and change my blood. I’m 62 years old, and I’m gonna do this work until I die.” Schouest turned to Bayou Carlin. Raising his chin toward Vermilion Bay, he said, “They’re gonna find me going around in circles out there.”