Shrimp from Sea to Scampi
The story of the Gulf Coast shrimping industry and how the pink crusta-ceam became a Southwest Florida favorite
Tracking Florida’s succulent pink shrimp from their home in the Gulf waters to San Carlos Island and finally to your dinner plate.
In 1848 a California carpenter and sawmill operator accidentally noticed a small piece of shiny metal near his mill. It was gold and the great gold rush began. One hundred and one years later, as the story goes, in 1949, a Gulf fisherman had a problem with one of his nets. It was night, well after his usual fishing day, when he was finally able to retrieve it. In it was something he had never before netted. It was gold. Pink gold! The pink Gulf shrimp, a nocturnal shrimp that only swims at night, had been caught. A new, different sort of gold rush began and, with it, the birth of the Florida Gulf shrimp fishing industry. San Carlos Island, a spit of land between Fort Myers and Fort Myers Beach, became a focal point for the industry, and here wharves, shrimp dealers and processors sprang up creating a small supply village.
At the industry’s height some 200 shrimp boats considered San Carlos Island their home port. Today, for various reasons, those boom years seem to be over. In 2006, for example, more than 5 million pounds ($11 million worth) of shrimp were off- loaded onto San Carlos docks, but by 2013, the bounty had fallen to slightly less than half that amount. There are fewer active shrimpers today, too, with only small fleets at various Florida Gulf Coast ports. The largest of these fleets, about 50 boats, is still at Fort Myers or, more precisely, San Carlos Island.
Although there are several thousand species of shrimp in the world, only a few have commercial value. The pink shrimp, found only in the Gulf of Mexico, is considered by many to be the best of them all.
At first shrimpers processed their catch aboard and kept it on ice until off-loading in Fort Myers. Unfortunately shrimp don’t stay fresh very long on just plain ice and trips had to be kept fairly short. Some shrimpers, however, found that they could extend that time by adding some chemical preservative to the catch. But even so, 20 days out was a maximum. And, regardless of how long an “ice boat” had been out, unloading its iced-shrimp cargo was time consuming and required special equipment. That all changed in the 1970s with the advent of on-board quick freezing.
Shrimpers no longer do any on-board processing, and the so-called “ice boats” are a thing of the past. Today, the shrimp catch is bagged aboard ship and put immediately into a special sub-zero freezing tank. Within seconds it’s frozen solid, moved into a freezer hold and kept there until off-loading time. When flash-frozen this way, wild-caught Gulf pink shrimp don’t need chemicals to keep them looking and tasting fresh.
The search for “pink gold” may not be as tough as that faced by Maine lobstermen in northern winter seas, but it is by no means idyllic either. Henry Gore, owner and captain of the Lexi Joe, spends much of his time in that search, often a month or more afloat. Much of his day, and that of his two-man crew, is spent sleeping because when the sun is out, the shrimp are not. Shrimping is done at night. Dark hour after dark hour is spent slowly dragging four immense nets, specially designed to hold just shrimp, along sandy bottoms. Any errant turtle or fish that might get caught can escape from the net.
Just how many shrimp are netted each night varies greatly. Gore needs to average about $2,000 worth a night to make any sort of reasonable profit. Fuel costs alone can run from $10,000 to $20,000 for each trip.
AT THE INDUSTRY’S HEIGHT SOME 200 SHRIMP BOATS CONSIDERED SAN CARLOS ISLAND THEIR HOME PORT.
Life for a shrimper might not be so difficult if he was always awake at night, but every month or so, for just a few weeks, his habits have to change. Gore’s family and friends are daytime people. Every so often, he has to make a radical, 12-hour change in his sleep/wake pattern. It’s a life that Gore with his 30 years as a shrimper has become used to. Asked whether or not some other type of work might have been better, “Yeah” he says, “something that wouldn’t keep me away from my family so much of the time.”
When each shrimper’s trip ends another begins for the shrimp. Sack after sack, each filled with about 75 pounds of flash-frozen shrimp, are hoisted from the boat’s freezer hold and placed on a dealer’s conveyor belt. Some shrimpers, like Gore, are independent boat owners and may sell to any of several dealers. Other boats are owned by dealers themselves. The Trico Shrimp Company, one of the two shrimp dealers in Fort Myers Beach, has 15 such boats and is one of the largest of the local, company-owned fleets.
Until a few years ago, shrimp were processed and wholesaled in Fort Myers. A warehouse full of equipment near the wharves was used to sort and package the catch for shipment. Times and the economy have changed, though, and so too have the systems.
Today, at the Trico Shrimp Company, sacks of frozen shrimp are off-loaded directly into the wharf-side facility and piled on to wooden shipping pallets. And, since shrimp are size-graded by the approximate number per pound (15 to 20, for example) random sacks are opened and a handful of shrimp is taken from each to be counted and weighed. In this way the dealer can determine the rough size-grade for each load. When the pallet is finally filled with several layers of 70-plus pound sacks full of frozen shrimp, it’s shrink-wrapped in plastic and forklifted onto a waiting 18-wheeled, refrigerated trailer-truck to be taken directly to a wholesale distributor in Tampa. Most of the final sorting and preparation for sale is done there.
In 2013, according to Christine Gala, a Trico owner, 1,700,000 pounds of frozen shrimp passed through her company’s doors. A relatively small amount was kept for direct sales to local area restaurants and seafood markets. Trico also maintains its own small retail market. The bulk of the shrimp, however, was sent to a large wholesale distributor in Tampa.
With all that’s caught, sold, cooked and eaten, it’s difficult to imagine that there’s anyone who doesn’t know something about shrimp. They may not have had the pleasure of eating it, sampling it or seeing some shrimp, but could anyone not be familiar at all with the crustacean?
In Southwest Florida nothing is impossible. As Gala tells it, a visiting couple bought some shrimp from her retail store. A few days later they returned to complain. “The shrimp was soft. Sort of mushy and tasted funny.” Gala apologized, said she was sorry they’d been dissatisfied and, because the complaint
was unusual and puzzling, she asked, “How did you cook the shrimp?” The reply, two words that were more of a question than anything else, solved the puzzle. “Cooked it?”
There are dozens of fine restaurants in Southwest Florida. Many have plush seats, white tablecloths, fancy silverware and flickering candlelight. On their menus, along with meat, pasta and seafood entrees, you’ll find one or two shrimp dishes. Salty Papa’s Shrimp House in Fort Myers Beach is not one of these. It has hard, plain wooden tables and chairs with brown wrapping paper serving as a tablecloth. But its menu isn’t confined to only one or two of the usual shrimp entrees. Excluding variations like hot, cold or blackened, there are 10 separate and distinctly proprietary shrimp dishes on the menu, and every one is a shrimp lover’s delight.
Some restaurants use foreign, imported pond-raised shrimp. It’s less expensive. Here, again, Salty Papa’s Shrimp House in Fort Myers is not one of them. Papa’s chef, Joe Voigt, says, “We use only wild-caught pink Gulf shrimp. Quality, to us, is more important than just price. We think it’s something our customers appreciate.”
Every one of Salty Papa’s shrimp dishes is a prime example. Ranging from basic fried shrimp on up to the old Southern classic, shrimp and grits, Papa’s menu has one surprising omission: shrimp scampi. The reasons, owner Vall Arnett explains, are twofold, “First, it’s something almost everyone has; sort of a cliché. And then, too, my vision was to concentrate on Southern American recipes. Scampi is more of a European dish.” But, as Arnett was quick to say, “If a customer came in and really wanted shrimp scampi, we’d make it.”
In the end, there was one question I couldn’t resist asking this owner of a shrimp restaurant: “Do you personally eat much shrimp?” Arnett’s answer, “No, they’re not something I especially care for,” surprises me until she explains. “I worked in a restaurant, once, and had to peel and prepare 200 to 300 pounds of shrimp a day. Comes a time,” she says, “when you just really can’t enjoy them any longer.” As for me, it’s hard to imagine ever having too many shrimp, but like most any other shrimp lover, I’d sure like to try.
“WE USE ONLY WILD-CAUGHT PINK GULF SHRIMP. QUALITY, TO US, IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN JUST PRICE. WE THINK IT’S SOMETHING OUR CUSTOMERS APPRECIATE.”
— JOE VOIGT, CHEF AT SALTY PAPA’S
Alan Smith is a retired music-licensing executive, his second career after many years as a television ( Today Show) writer/ producer. He is currently active in a Sanibel Island writers’ group.