Shrimping near New Orleans

December 21, 2005
A Brighter View Astern Than Over the Bow
By KIM SEVERSON

Chalmette, La.

IT'S early morning on a marshy stretch of water that runs east from New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico. Ray Brandhurst, who has known nothing but the Louisiana shrimping life, is three cans of iced tea and a dozen Kools into his day.

On the rear deck of the 50-foot shrimp boat he built by hand - a boat that Hurricane Katrina sent halfway to the bottom of Bayou Bienvenue - Mr. Brandhurst jerks a line securing a green mesh net.

All at once a thousand pounds of wild white shrimp, each about the length of a ball point pen and kicking for its life, pours onto the deck and buries his stubby white shrimper boots.

"We're having our Bubba Gump moment, all right," says Mr. Brandhurst, who can't resist quoting from the movie "Forrest Gump."

Those shrimp, fat from the marsh debris stirred up by both Katrina and Rita and as plentiful as Mr. Brandhurst has seen in his 30 years of shrimping, are about all he has left.

Like many men and women who made their living pulling oysters and shrimp from the waters of Southeast Louisiana, the Brandhurst family was laid flat by Katrina. A wall of water 25 feet high wiped out nearly every home, boat and business in Chalmette and surrounding St. Bernard Parish, about a half-hour drive from downtown New Orleans.

More than three months after the storm, the parish remains a moldy, wrecked shell of what was home to 70,000 people, most of whom made their living from the water.

The Brandhursts' four-bedroom ranch house in Chalmette, the largest community in the parish, sat in water for weeks. Down the street, he and his wife, Kay, ran a retail shop called Rebel Seafood, where for 20 years they peeled shrimp, cut fish and boiled seafood. It's gone too. So are thousands of family snapshots and two generations of recipes, including a handwritten cookbook that doubled as a family journal for Ray's mother. Those are what Kay misses the most.

The couple and their children are squished into a one-bedroom apartment in an ugly New Orleans subdivision, an hour's drive from the boat and their old lives. Within weeks the shrimp will stop running for the season and the Bubba Gump moment will be over. The Brandhursts, one of the last Louisiana wild-shrimp families, will have to figure out if they have enough insurance and fortitude to scrape together a new life or salvage one in an industry that was dying even before the hurricanes.

"When this is over we have no income," said Mr. Brandhurst, 48, explaining why he spends 18 hours every day shrimping. "I can't afford to walk away from it. I've got four kids."

In a way Katrina was just one more blow to the industry. For years rising fuel costs and falling prices have eaten away at what little profit shrimpers made.

America transferred its affection from domestic to imported shrimp years ago. Now imports make up as much as 88 percent of the market, most of them from places like Vietnam, Ecuador, Thailand and China. Plenty of imported shrimp are farm-raised, and batches have tested positive for antibiotics banned for use in the United States.

But fishmongers at places like the Fulton Fish Market in New York say Gulf shrimp are inconsistent in both flavor and size. The shrimp have thin, harder-to-peel shells. Some taste of the iodine-rich kelp they eat. Imported shrimp, on the other hand, are bred to have thicker shells and less delicate flesh. They are easier to care for and sell.

Ask Mr. Brandhurst about imported or farmed shrimp, and he'll shoot you a look.

"They have tweaked the genetics on them so much they're a commodity now, like soybeans," he said.

The market has changed, too. People don't have as much time to cook, he said. "They don't want to spend half an hour peeling shrimp before they start cooking."

In Florida and Texas some companies farm shrimp organically, with an eye to limiting environmental damage. The bulk of the nation's domestic wild shrimp still come from big factory trawlers working the Gulf's open waters. Texas shrimp tend to be larger than most, and Florida produces firm wild pink shrimp that have a certain appeal.

The ones taken off Louisiana, where two-thirds of the vessels are 50 feet long or less, tend to be smaller. But Mr. Brandhurst, along with plenty of cooks in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, will tell you that what comes from Louisiana waters is the sweetest of all the Gulf shrimp.

Louisiana, second only to Alaska in the amount of seafood that hits its piers, produces the most domestic shrimp. In 2004 Louisiana took about 120 million pounds out of the water.

But with less than a quarter of the shrimpers back in business and most of the state's processing centers knocked out, the catch might reach only 60 million pounds in 2006, said Ewell Smith, executive director of the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board. And though shrimp are plentiful now, there's no telling how much damage the habitat sustained.

"We lost as much marshland between these two storms as we would have lost over 45 years," Mr. Smith said.

Mr. Brandhurst, who bought his first shrimp boat at 15, has been watching the business slip for a decade. In the 1980's and early 1990's, he recalled, maybe 400 shrimp boats worked the lakes and bayous between New Orleans and the Gulf. The numbers kept dropping, and just before Katrina hit fewer than 100 remained. Now he pretty much has the water to himself.

The Louisiana oystermen might have it worse. In 2004 about two-thirds of this country's 750,000 million pounds of in-shell oysters were "Gulf easterns." Louisiana produced most of those. The 2006 harvest will be down at least 60 percent, said Mike Voisin, a lifelong oysterman who runs an industry-government partnership called the Louisiana Oyster Task Force.

Many of the state's oysters were killed by the hurricane's huge silt deposits. The storm was so violent, thousands of acres of oyster beds and reefs were smashed and will have to be rebuilt and restocked.

Although Mr. Voisin said that plenty of oysters will be available for holiday feasts, the extent of the damage hasn't yet sunk in.

"I still wipe my eyes when I talk about it," he said. "You think back on all that these people have been through, the shock of it. People just can't get focused. They can't set a direction."

But like the shrimpers, the oystermen are driven to rebuild their industry. And that means defending southeast Louisiana seafood with an attitude that is part pride and part defiance. At a place like Domilise's po' boy shop in the Uptown neighborhood of New Orleans or at the Bourbon House oyster bar in the French Quarter, ask where the seafood is from and the answer is, "It better be from Louisiana."

Outside the state, the nation is feeling a little squeamish about Louisiana seafood. "When the people saw the city being dewatered and the press labeled it toxic soup, that just killed our seafood sales," Mr. Smith said.

But things are looking up. All of the state's two million acres of oyster beds are open, damaged or not. On Dec. 8 a team of health inspectors from the state, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared that hundreds of samples taken out of estuaries near New Orleans and all the way over to the Gulf shores of Alabama showed that the seafood was safe.

The truest test of Louisiana's seafood might be from the people in New Orleans who are eating it, which is pretty much whoever can afford it or find a restaurant with enough shuckers to keep the oysters coming.

For Mrs. Brandhurst, shrimp is the staple on her table. Before Katrina, every other dinner she fed her children was shrimp or, in the off-season, boiled or stuffed crawfish. They were sick of it.

Two months after the storm, when Mr. Brandhurst had finally refloated his boat and pulled in his first load of shrimp, he took a bag back to the family's small apartment. ###