A call for the price of shrimp to rise as St. Helena Island’s boats head to sea

The future is uncertain for shrimpers in coastal South Carolina — but you wouldn’t know that from the bright, buoyant crowd that gathered Saturday at the Gay Fish Company. Attendees rang in the start of the 2024 season with cowbells and noisemakers, sending off a fleet of shrimp trawlers into the Harbour River as their nets waved like sails in the gentle morning breeze.

Owned by a family of veterans spanning three generations, the Gay Fish Company on St. Helena Island held its inaugural “Blessing of the Fleet” Saturday morning. Typically involving a local pastor praying over captains for a safe and bountiful season, the practice has been a staple in fishing communities for centuries. But as fisheries up and down the coast grapple with industry shakeups from overseas, the ceremony takes on a new sort of significance.

“We ask, Lord, that the shrimp prices will go up and the diesel prices will go down,” said Captain Bob Upton Jr., son of the late Beaufort fisherman and Shrimp Shack co-founder Robert Upton . “It never hurt to dream and shoot for the stars, right?”

That prayer in particular resonated with the crowd, eliciting chuckles and one hearty “Amen.”

Floods of cheap, farm-raised shrimp coming from Asia have recently sunk prices to “rock bottom” in Beaufort County and other coastal fishing communities, explained Cyndy Gay Carr, a former mortgage lender and current business manager for the Gay Fish Company. With imported products making up an estimated 93% of shrimp sales in the U.S. , a pound of prawns caught locally can now go for less than $1.

“You just can’t do wild-caught shrimp at that price, especially when fuel is $3.50-plus a gallon,” Carr told The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette. “And these boats take quite a bit of fuel to go out.”

Those unmanageable prices have pushed many local shrimpers out of the industry. Since 1990, the number of shrimp boats combing the waters of Beaufort County has fallen from 100 to about 20, estimated Craig Reaves, owner of Beaufort’s Sea Eagle Market. Almost half of today’s trawlers dock at the Gay Fish Company.

But fishermen are fighting back. Reaves and other board members of the Southern Shrimp Alliance (SSA) — which represents industry employees across the southeast Atlantic and Gulf Coast — are pressing the federal government to declare a fishery resource disaster , which would allow local shrimpers to receive financial relief payments.

Carr says the Gay Fish Company is also part of the South Carolina Shrimpers Association, which supports heightened tariffs on foreign-imported shrimp and stricter regulations for industries overseas.

Shrimpers across the Lowcountry agree they have nature on their side. While imports might be chemically altered or subject to far fewer inspections, the clean local waters are said to produce some of the best product in the world.

“The watershed in St. Helena Sound is one of the most pure on the East Coast,” Carr said Saturday morning. “So we have to protect that, and we have to be proud of that.”

‘We cannot survive without your support’

Upton blessed the shrimp boats and captains with a proud, strong voice, not unlike what you might hear in a Sunday sermon. Although he acknowledged the current issues plaguing the local industry, he steered his speech towards optimism.

“We pray for a bountiful catch, but we also know there’s gonna be long days ahead,” Upton said. “We know the seas aren’t always going to be calm. ... You’re gonna miss your family. And I know sometimes you’re gonna say, ‘Why am I doing this?’”

The answer is self-evident, he says. Many captains in attendance started out as hobbyists but got “hooked” on the thrill of the hunt: “There’s something about this Lowcountry salt marsh and pluff mud that you just can’t get rid of. It stays in your system.”

Upton recalled what his father used to call a “clean corn catch,” recognizable in the satisfying sound of fresh shrimp hitting the deck’s surface. “My dad said it would sound like dumping a bag of corn out — clean corn. And that keeps you going.”

Among the crowd Saturday morning was S.C. State Rep. Shannon Erickson (R), who co-sponsored legislation this January asking Gov. Henry McMaster to declare an economic disaster for the state’s domestic shrimping industry. That bill was quickly referred to committee and is unlikely to be enacted before the end of the legislative session on May 9.

Wrapping up her speech Saturday morning, Carr emphasized that the movement to support local industry extends beyond the Gay Fish Company — even beyond fish. She commended local artists and bakers who sell their products at the market, the Dempsey Farms right down the road and the Sanders family’s world-famous tomatoes at Seaside Farm.

“We are all watermen, we are all farmers, and we cannot survive without your support,” Carr told the crowd. “So please, go out and find your local farmer, find your local shrimper, find your local crabber ... and when you see us in the grocery store, and we’ve got white boots on and we’re dirty and we stink — don’t run away from us; thank us, because every one of those guys are out there every day, providing you with quality organic seafood from one of the most natural waterways in South Carolina.”