Walleye, Ebi, and Gulf Gloom
May has arrived, and we now start shipping the ‘world’s sweetest Walleye’ direct from the Red Lake Nation Reservation in northern Minnesota. These Walleye are caught and processed year-round (except in April when the ice is too thin) by the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, and they are packing 20 pound boxes of skin-on fillet at $10.90/lb delivered.
Through July we will be working with a mid-water trawler from Prince William Sound landing twice weekly at Seward with the famous Alaska Wild Side-Stripe Shrimp. These are the super sweet shrimp that the Japanese call ‘Ebi’ and most of his catch will be headed for Asia. They will pack ocean-run in 20 pound boxes and deliver at $12.90/lb. From Homer we continue to land beautiful Halibut, Black Cod, Pacific Cod, and trolled King Salmon from Sitka.
Jack Cox and the boys from Beaufort, NC have been landing beautiful Mahi-Mahi and Wahoo in addition to Triggerfish, Amberjack, and Tuna, and hope to continue.
The word from Louisiana is fear.
Boats are out and landing this week, but they do not know about next. Early Sunday morning, long tendrils of oil sheen made their way into South Pass, a major channel through the salt marshes of Louisiana’s southeastern boot-heel. The real threat lurks offshore in a swelling, churning slick of dense, rust-colored oil now the size of Puerto Rico. ’That is the very first sign of oil I’ve heard of inside South Pass,’ said Venice, LA boat captain Bob Kenney, shaking his head. ’It’s crushing, man, it’s crushing.’ South Pass is a breeding ground for the crab, oysters, shrimp, redfish and other seafood he and his family catch.
The spill should eclipse the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident as the worst U.S. oil disaster in history. But a growing number of experts warned that the situation may already be much worse.
‘I made the mistake of looking at what happened in Alaska on the computer last night, then I couldn’t even sleep,’ said Dean Blanchard of Grand Isle, one of the largest shrimpers on the Gulf Coast. ‘They’ve still got problems over there. If it takes me 20 years to recover, I’m out of business. That’s my whole life down the drain.’
‘The spill and the spreading is getting so much faster and expanding much quicker than they estimated,’ said Hans Graber, of the University of Miami. Oil industry experts and officials are reluctant to describe what, exactly, a worst-case scenario would look like, but if the oil gets into the Gulf Stream and carries it to the beaches of Florida, it stands to be an environmental and economic disaster of epic proportions. The well is at the end of one branch of the Gulf Stream, the warm-water current that flows from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Atlantic. Several experts said that if the oil enters the stream, it would flow around the southern tip of Florida and up the eastern seaboard. ‘It will be on the East Coast of Florida in almost no time,’ Graber said. ‘I don’t think we can prevent that. It’s more of a question of when rather than if.’
In Pass Christian, MS, 61-year-old Jimmy Rowell, a third-generation shrimp and oyster fisherman, worked on his boat at the harbor and stared out at the choppy waters. ‘It’s over for us. If this oil comes ashore, it’s just over for us,’ Rowell said angrily, rubbing his forehead. ‘Nobody wants no oily shrimp.’
