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A Family Business Beached
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Tran rode out the storm in Houston with his immediate family, returning later to survey the damage. He isn't sure he wants to continue in the shrimping business.
"You work all day and all night," he said. "You don't sleep out there. At first I liked it, but now I don't like it."
Like it or not, it is hard to imagine life here any other way. In the towns around Bayou Lafourche, everything revolves around the water. There are stores that repair nets and sell bait and other equipment. There are charter fishing boat companies for leisure anglers. There is a small restaurant that caters to wealthy outsiders with summer homes built on wooden stilts over the bayou.
And, of course, there is shrimping.
Boat crews go out for at least two to six weeks at a time, trading their family life for the constant smell of diesel and salty spray from the gulf waters. The groups of four to five men work all night -- shrimping is best in the moonlight -- tossing out nets and hauling them in. Each boat boasts two huge metal poles, called outriggers, used to cast the nets.
The season runs from May, when trawling boats line up at the mouth of the bayou to get to the gulf, until October or December, depending on the size of the boat and where it is trawling.
From 1996 until 2001, business was good. Fuel was cheap and shrimp prices hovered around $5 a pound. But in recent years, cheap farm-raised shrimp from Asia -- including from Vietnam -- has undercut Louisiana shrimpers, locals say. Shrimp now goes for $3.25 a pound. And due to the rising cost of fuel, it can take as much as $65,000 to fill the massive tanks of a 100-foot boat.
"It's the same thing as going to a casino," Nguyen said. "Sometimes you lose. Anybody in the shrimping business is taking a gamble."
Last year, Nguyen's shrimping business barely broke even.
"It's a dying business for the Vietnamese," said Nguyen's son Vuong. "It's the field that got us to where we are, but it's time to get out. You can see the signs every year we're not making a profit."
Ngo Van Nguyen looked at the last catch one of his boats had in its belly before the hurricane struck and ponders what he might do next. "I wait and see what will happen," he said. "I will look and see for a job. I don't know what I will do exactly."
He stared down at his shoes. "Maybe I will clean up for someone else," he said.
