Lowcountry Shrimp Fleet - Page 2

We’re heading toward a channel, about 500-feet wide, where container ships pass by on each side to and from the ports. When the clock strikes 5, the nets and doors will drop. Shrimp, white and brown - domestic and wild-caught, in the political parlance – are what Wayne and his crew is after. After the nets have repeatedly filled, and the shrimp have been sorted from the by-catch, cleaned, and headed, the next step is to take them to market.

In a coastal community lush with restaurants, bar and grills, and taverns where shrimp is devoured non-stop, the market for fresh product just out of the water would seem to be enormous.

Trawlers in the water and restaurants on the shore: That’s what you see where Coleman Boulevard crosses over Shem Creek, after all. The shrimp boats leave the docks long before the sun is up and return with seafood fresh from local waters. While dining, with the nets and rigging of the local fleet right there before your eyes, the obvious assumption would be that the shrimp your server just placed before you must have arrived on those boats as they returned to the dock.

But like Sportin’ Life sang in Porgy: It ain’t necessarily so. Even with the buoy balls hanging from the walls, the nets and doors décor, and the working fleet in the background. And several of the local shrimp fishermen are not pleased with what they see as smoke-and-mirrors. “It makes you mad,” Wayne says. “When I go to a restaurant, I want to know what I’m eating. I want to know where it came from.”

He’s not alone. From the Southern Shrimp Alliance, which represents warm water fisheries from eight states that border the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, on down, advocacy groups have sought to raise public awareness of a wide gap between perception and reality. “92-percent of people surveyed think they are eating domestic, ocean-caught, shrimp when they live in or visit a coastal area,” says Eddie Gordon, executive director of Wild American Shrimp. “And yet we know that 85-percent of the shrimp is imported.”

Continued on page 3

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