home

1   2    next page ›

S

hrimp trawlers were rafting up four and five deep across Oriental’s harbor before noon on Friday, their holds full of Pamlico Sound shrimp which the crews were unloading at the docks of Garland Fulcher Seafood. The seafood plant is expecting to take in — literally — at least 15 boat loads by Saturday.

Oriental’s harbor just before noon on Friday. By law trawlers have to have nets out of the water by sunset on Friday, but shrimp were so plentiful this week, that many trawlers were lined up even on Thursday to get their catch unloaded.

The early reports are that the trawlers are finding bigger shrimp this week than last, which will come as good news for people who’ve been waiting for the arrival of locally-harvested freshly-caught crustaceans. However, the news may be mixed for the boat captains.

When the shrimp season started a few weeks ago, the thinking was that the Pamlico Sound shrimp might be fetching a better price than they did last year. Mike Styron of Garland Fulcher Seafood, which buys the shrimp from the trawlers, says that, “With the Gulf oil spill, we were assuming that the shrimp price would be high this year.” That seemed a reasonable expectation since there’d be less competition as many shrimp boats in the Gulf of Mexico were not fishing because of the oil-damaged waters.

On Thursday morning, the trawler, San-Dia out of McClellanville, South Carolina had a cargo hold full of shrimp that the crew had gathered since Sunday. At left, Oriental native Clint Belangia who works on the South Carolina-based trawler, and at right, fellow crewmember, Shawn White who pours a basket of shrimp in to a waiting metal bucket next to the dock at Garland Fulcher Seafood.

But word on the docks in Oriental on Thursday was that instead of the economics of shortage and demand kicking in to gear, there’s another factor in play: the compensation package that British Petroleum has been paying out.

Mike Styron says BP was paying compensation not only to the Gulf shrimp trawlers idled by the spill, but also to the big shrimp processing plants along the Gulf. Those are the plants where Garland Fulcher Seafood has, in other years, sent its smaller shrimp, the ones that consumers might not want to be bothered with peeling in a shrimp boil.

Mike Styron, at Garland Fulcher Seafood in the room where the shrimp comes in off of the boats.

Because the Gulf processing plants are taking the BP money, they are not as motivated to buy the small shrimp from here, says Mike’s father, Sherrill Styron, who owns Garland Fulcher Seafood. The BP disaster, says Sherrill Styron, “hurt us instead of helped us.”

Just seconds off of a trawler, shrimp on its way in to Garland Fulcher Seafood..

Sherrill Styron says that while there is demand for the larger shrimp — the ones that weigh in at 16-20 or 21-25 or 26-30 per pound — a sizeable proportion of the shrimp still being trawled in the Pamlico Sound has been smaller than that. Being unable to send the small shrimp to the Gulf processors, Sherrill Styron has to weigh whether it’s economically feasible to freeze and store it here for processing at a later date.

That calculation goes in to determining the price the captains get.

Size matters. The sorter at the seafood plant divides the shrimp by size. While the larger shrimp are in demand, the smaller shrimp less so. The small ones are usually sent to processing plants on the Gulf, but they are not motivated to buy them now as they are receiving compensation from BP for the oil disaster that shut down shrimping in that area.

1   2    next page ›

Posted Friday July 16, 2010 by Melinda Penkava

email this story | back to top