A SHELL OF ITSELF
Father-son oystermen fight to save a gutted industry, their only livelihood
Adrian Gutierrez tugged on a pair of waders as his father, Alex, pulled a cable hand over hand to bring up the shrimp net hanging off the back of their boat. The pair did not catch enough along the Houston Ship Channel the day before to cover the cost of fuel. This day was looking similarly bad.
With the rising sun warming the breeze, the younger man sorted the catch, tossing jellies off the side of the Santana, drawing a following of eager seagulls whose cries mixed with the clanging rigging.
The father and son are oystermen. Shrimping is how they get by in the offseason while they wait to start oyster fishing, which usually is a better way to make a living. Lately, though, oyster fishing has not been going well.
Years of punishing coastal storms destroyed and damaged oyster reefs, and boats crowd over those that remain. Strict state regulations have made things harder. Texas officials, backed by environmental advocates and academic experts, have closed reefs and shortened seasons, saying the oysters needed protection.
Last year’s season, for instance, was supposed to last six months but ended before three because the state effectively closed every reef.
Fishermen and state officials do not agree on how to manage the oyster supply in bays up and down the Texas coast in an environmentally and economically sustainable way. Scientists say the fishermen’s metal dredges damage reefs. Financially strapped oystermen want regulators to trust their knowledge and experience, and leave more areas open for them to collect the popular shellfish.
A week later, Alex and Adrian Gu
tierrez planned to join hundreds of frustrated and anxious oyster fishermen at a Texas Parks and Wildlife meeting in Austin, losing a valuable day on the water just after the season began in hopes of convincing the state to leave three reefs near Matagorda Bay open and calling attention to their hardships.
For the oystermen, it is a fight for their livelihoods and the future of their careers.
Alex Gutierrez, 54, has been fishing since before Adrian was born. He has little social life and starts most days before the sun peeks above the horizon. Fishing is his passion. Even after Hurricane Ike flooded the family’s Galveston home and wiped out their savings, Gutierrez returned to the water.
On the Santana earlier that morning, Adrian Gutierrez rested on a mattress on the floor of the wheelhouse while his father steered the humming boat in the dark and chatted with other fishermen on the radio. As the sun rose, Alex Gutierrez watched for container ships and barges, instructing his son in Spanish and hand signals. The pair work in tandem with a rhythm developed over time.
The son’s love for fishing matches his father’s, and it scares Gutierrez.
“It’s hard, hard work,” he says. “I see the struggle in this business. Sometimes I prefer for him to do something else because I see the fight we’ve been going through with the state and with Mother Nature.”
An oyster family
Texas’ oyster season began Nov. 1.
Two days before, Agustin and Perla Martinez and their 14year-old son, Yahel, took their boat, Bad Johnny, out on Galveston Bay. Father and son checked oil levels and kept an eye on the engine temperature, making sure everything was ready for Agustin to get back to work.
Like the Gutierrezes, the Martinezes need the oystering income. Earlier in the year, Agustin Martinez, 38, had gotten so desperate he took a job in North Carolina building metal sheds. Oyster season was upon them now.
Sitting on the deck with her hair pulled back and the wind in her face, Perla Martinez remarked, “It feels nice, huh?”
Theirs is an oyster family. Yahel’s grandfathers and three uncles were fisherman. His parents met through oyster fishing. Photos of their boat hang on their San Leon living room walls.
It never has been easy.
One foggy day before Christmas, when Yahel was an infant, his father’s leg got caught in the anchor rope. Doctors ended up having to amputate it, and Martinez learned to work with a prosthetic.
Bills in recent years stressed them. Last year, they took no vacations, and Christmas presents were few. Sometimes Martinez got work on privately leased reefs. He took a job with an oyster farm off Bolivar Peninsula, but the pay did not make the long drive worthwhile.
He spent some $5,000 renewing his fishing licenses and buying equipment before the start of this year’s season.
“It’s hard right now for everybody,” he said.
Yahel looked over his dad’s shoulder and out the window. He dreams of joining the Coast Guard but wonders whether his family would be able to send him and his brothers to college.
When the season began two days later, only three of nine areas in Galveston Bay were open, by state order. Martinez and other fishermen arose early to stake their places in the two best spots. Parks and wildlife officials had sampled the areas and found these were the only ones with enough oysters to be fished relatively safely.
The fishermen scoffed, but there they were, steering in circles, dragging their cage-like dredges over the reef below.
The goal was to fill 30 sacks with about 100 pounds of market-size adult oysters before 3:30 p.m., when regulations required the boats to return to the docks. A full sack could sell for $50.
Mud spattered on Martinez’s polo shirt in the chilly morning. He had lent his sweatshirt to his deckhand. Choppy waves rocked the boat, and a light rain blew. The deckhand steadily knocked baby oysters off larger ones with a hatchet, while Martinez raised the dredge from the water with a beat-up chain before dumping it out on the work table. They worked in meditative silence.
There were lots of oysters. For now.
“I’m happy,” Martinez said. He stood at the wheel as the wind and rain picked up, looked at the shivering reporter and shrugged.
“It’s the job,” he said.
The Santana circled at a distance, with Alex Gutierrez head-to-toe in rain gear. He was working with two hired deckhands.
“I’m not destroying anything,” he said.
Adrian Gutierrez was at home, waiting to hear if he would get an interview for a construction job his father wanted him to consider.
Fighting for a future
The Gutierrezes and Martinezes, fathers and sons both, were in Austin on Nov. 3, along with hundreds of other oyster fishermen hoping to persuade Texas Parks and Wildlife commissioners to keep the three reefs in Matagorda Bay open.
The commissioners would have more than the fishermen on their minds. Oyster reefs are habitats for other species and protect against storm surge. Scientists such as Jennifer Pollack at the Harte Research Institute repeatedly had advised: Prohibiting oyster harvest could help the oyster population grow.
“Dredging a reef can reduce reef height,” Pollack told commissioners at a meeting in March. “You can imagine, it sort of chops the top of the reef off, which exposes those organisms to lower oxygen conditions in the bottom, increases sedimentation, increases burial of the reef and ... decreases the size of the reef because it’s removing the shell and the oysters themselves.”
Outside the department headquarters last month, Adrian Gutierrez knelt and filled out what felt like a hundred sign-in forms for fellow fishermen, who primarily spoke Spanish. They needed to convince the commissioners to let them fish if the younger man was going to have a career in this business.
Watching his son from the edge of the crowd, Alex Gutierrez said, “I’m so proud.”
A few minutes later, he started arguing with Parks and Wildlife officials. The rangers were letting some white fishermen get forms before the Latino fishermen who waited.
“They got privilege,” said Gutierrez, who never finished school after moving from Mexico. “We don’t have privilege over here.”
Inside, Yahel and Agustin Martinez sat at a round table by a row of vending machines, writing down what they would say to the commissioners.
Many of the fishermen had been here in March to press the same fight with commissioners, asking them to leave more reefs open during the season.
In the hearing room, the Gutierrezes sat two rows in front of the Martinezes. Adrian Gutierrez was the first to speak.
He was a second-generation fisherman, he told the commissioners.
“I don’t agree with the proposals,” he said.
His father followed, taking off his cap.
“I’m just going to speak out of my heart,” he said. “I’ve been a fisherman for the past 36 years. It’s the only thing I know how to do.”
He paused. “You see my son? I raised my kids through this job.”
Gutierrez said he thought the in-season closures were setting the fishermen up to fail, forcing them into one area and leaving them to be blamed for destroying it. “You think I want to destroy my future?” he asked.
The audience of fishermen broke out in applause.
When it was his turn to speak, Yahel Martinez choked back tears.
“I can’t go to school without thinking about my dad, if he’s going to have a job or not,” he said. “It’s very hard at this moment.”
Commission Chair Arch “Beaver” Aplin found the testimony emotional but kept coming back to the fact that the resource was failing to keep up with demand.
In an interview a few weeks later, he said opening all the reefs would be reckless. And he acknowledged that opening fewer reefs meant more concentrated fishing.
“It’s a balance of us wanting to help that industry prosper and manage our state’s resource,” Aplin said. “At the end of the day, our real job at Texas Parks and Wildlife is to take care of the resource and keep it in a space where it can be enjoyed and be healthy.”
The commissioners voted to shut the three reefs permanently. Aplin pushed the agency to chart out a sustainable solution for the industry before the legislative session. He later said privately leasing areas to fishermen to plant their own reefs could be part of the solution, as could oyster farming.
Both options are expensive for any individual fisherman.
‘Struggling all the time’
Oyster leasing has helped some fishermen, like Misho Ivic, weather the hardships in recent years.
Ivic, 72, headed across Galveston Bay on a skiff one recent morning, his 32-year-old son, Joey, at the wheel. Three of his six kids work for his oyster business, and he worries about their futures.
Ivic moved to New Orleans from Croatia in 1972. Though he got an engineering degree, he pursued oyster fishing because he could make a good living and work for himself. He bought a boat, then a better one. He holds three oyster leases from Texas Parks and Wildlife.
Now, his family owns docks, runs an oyster restaurant and buys oysters from other fishermen, including Alex Martinez. The private leases have saved them in tough times. They decide how and when to fish those.
Still, Ivic said, “You have times when you wonder if you’re going to survive.”
A fisherman starting with a new lease would need money to plant a reef from scratch.
One of Ivic’s daughters married another oyster fisherman, Johny Jurisich, who has been brainstorming solutions for how everyday fishermen could survive. He argues that regulators could close reefs based on the average number of oyster sacks that came back every week per boat. If the number fell below a certain amount, regulators could close an area. That way, fishermen would not have to rely on the state’s sampling.
“The whole fishery agrees that the sampling now is inaccurate,” Jurisich said. “We all agree there are harvestable oysters in bays that are being kept closed. Focusing so many boats in so few areas is wrong and irresponsible.”
Jurisich also said there should be a better way to operate the state’s license buyback program for those ready to retire. The current reverse bidding process is confusing.
On the east side of Galveston Bay that morning Alex Gutierrez was upset. Three weeks into oyster season, too many boats crowded the area where he fished. His son had not felt up to coming with him, and may no longer see a future in oyster fishing, Gutierrez said. Already, it was taking all day to make his 30-sack limit. Soon, he would not make it. And then what?
The day was sunny and crisp, a welcome change from the last two days of work in the cold, but it was hard to enjoy. How was he going to get his two younger children through college? Everything was going the wrong way.
“You’re struggling all the time,” Gutierrez said.
On the west side of the bay, in an area largely picked over, Yahel Martinez moved like his father’s shadow. He watched as Agustin steered and took the wheel when his father stepped aside. From sunrise until about 10:30 a.m., they had dredged 10 sacks of oysters. On a good day, they would have had 20.
Martinez was teaching the boy to steer around the buoy that marked their spot without running it over. Yahel also was learning to bring up the dredge and shake it a few times to get rid of the mud.
“You’re the captain,” Martinez told him the day before.
A week later, Parks and Wildlife closed down the reef they were working.
On Thursday, state health officials closed the other main fishing area in Galveston Bay. One area in the bay remains open, but fishermen say they do not expect many oysters are there to harvest.