Shrimp season starts off Louisiana shores on a steady keel

Some of the boats — the bigger ones heading further out in Louisiana waters — began the vigil Sunday, waiting in tried and true waters for the clock hand to hit six Monday morning, marking the start of the 2016 brown shrimp season.

Other captains — many in much smaller vessels — hit the shrimping waters Monday before the sun came up, ready as well for the legally appointed time.

But a real picture of how shrimp boats, docks and processors will fare won’t emerge until later this week, when a few days of trawling rather than a scant few hours can be tallied and compared. Prices — on Monday around the same as they were before the inshore season opened — remained flat, with shrimp 40 and 50 to the pound netting about 90 cents at local docks.

“A lot of them are waiting for the night,” said Al Marmande, the Terrebonne Parish council member who operates Al’s Shrimp in Dularge. “They said they did fairly well but it’s hard to say. They had some big shrimp and some little shrimp that they are catching.”

More time will allow a better cost-benefit analysis for shrimpers who figure in expenses including the price of fuel to determine how the season will shape up.

“The fuel prices are lower this year than in previous years,” Marmande said. “That might change, it might go up.”

Montegut shrimper Lance Nacio said he had mixed results, some larger white shrimp, a passel of smaller brown ones, as he trawled with his vessel, the 55-foot Anna Marie, in Terrebonne Bay.

“We doing OK,” Nacio said. “There are some big shrimp. 16s and 21s, and the other stuff is all 70s and 80s.”

The first day of the season is when a large number of non-commercial shrimpers take to the water as well, pulling trawls behind boats more often used for catching recreational finfish.

Fresh catch from the nets of Montegut shrimper Lance Nacio graces the deck of his trawler, the 55-foot Anna Marie, on Monday, the first day of the commercial shrimp season in Louisiana.

COURTESY