The Last Haul: Stalked by Oil, Gulf Coast Fishermen Grab Everything They Can

Hand-painted signs for “Fresh Shrimp by Capt. Glen” hook travelers coming off of U.S. Route 98, which runs along the Gulf Coast of the Florida Panhandle and into Mississippi. Down a marina road in Carrabelle, Fla., an Igloo cooler sits on a dock in front of a weathered vessel called “Tressie and Chance.” Judy Bufkin and her son Capt. Glen finish up with a customer who bought 15 pounds of shrimp at $5 a pound for Memorial Day Weekend. The enormous Gulf Coast shrimp aren’t yet eight hours old, fresh from Glen’s overnight haul. “I should have hung onto the whole catch to sell here, we are going to sell out before this afternoon,” he says to his mother.

Glen’s piece of the dock is usually thick with tourists, but over the last few days plenty of locals have stopped by in preparation for the annual Dog Island “White Trash Bash,” a huge cookout held on one of the nearby sand islands. This year, a local tycoon bought some property, flooded part of it for a “mud bog” – a 4X4 truck playground -- and hired some rock bands for a party expected to draw 10,000 people. Shrimp, oysters, crab, and crawfish are always on the menu, and people are stocking up. Since the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon, Glen and his brother Bobby have only missed three nights of shrimping. “We’ve been hitting it hard,” says Glen of the breakneck pace. “We have no way of knowing if these closures are going to come this way, so we’re getting what we can now.”

North and west, Louisiana offers a worst case scenario. Big seafood is a $2.4 billion a year business here, but more than a quarter of the Gulf fishing and oystering waters were shut down, the workplaces for generations of fishermen, shrimpers, crabbers, oystermen, and charter guides. The areas that remained open weren’t even being worked to capacity. Seafood was thought to be tainted, even when it wasn’t. BP was paying as much as $6,000 to captains who retrofit their boats with booms and worked as oil skimmers. So families who’ve fished the Gulf of Mexico for 100 years were employed by the company that destroyed their livelihoods. Often times the contracts with BP banned them from discussing their Faustian bargains with the media. Nevertheless, through Memorial Day Weekend, Fast Company found some Gulf Coast workers who were eager to share scenes and thoughts about their drastically altered lives. The story was far more diverse than the one represented mostly by images of oily marshes and crude-stained beach scenes that dominate the 24-hour news cycle.

With Louisiana effectively shut down, demand had fallen squarely on oystermen, fishermen, and shrimpers around Apalachicola Bay, where seafood is an $80 million a year business. And business was booming. Fishing season started 11 days early and the usual bag limit on oyster was increased to 20 – to get that much in time to make a 2 p.m. dockside market call took an unprecedented level of backbreaking work cutting, raking, hauling, and sorting oysters.

Oyster grounds that were usually closed at this time a year (so oysters could grow and multiply for the next season), were opened. A kind of looting mentality set in as captains and dock workers filled truck after truck with fresh seafood bound for restaurants and markets far beyond their usual territory.
In a week, tar balls would start washing up on Pensacola beach. And as giant crude slicks closed in on Florida’s West Coast, it became clear that the Panhandle’s fertile fishing grounds were probably doomed – if the oil didn’t get them, then the scramble to grab every last untainted batch of seafood would.