SWAN QUARTER, N.C. — In Swan Quarter, North Carolina, on a hot August afternoon, Vernon Sadler pulled in his boat after spending two days on the water. He’s been shrimping ever since he quit school at 16.
“I’m born into it,” he said. “I don’t want to do nothing else.”
He’s 57 now and two or three times a week he pulls “Gary Wayne” into the Newman Seafood dock
[ Bill banning shrimp trawling along NC coast passes Senate ]
“I’ll come in whenever I get a boat full and I’ll go back out,” he said.
Dell Newman of Newman’s Seafood is always there to greet him and check out the catch.
“I look at the heads,” he said. “I look at the bodies.”
If all looks good, the fun begins. Sadler’s catch, sitting on ice is shoveled off the boat, put into baskets, rinsed, then dipped in a solution that kills algae.
Some shrimp are weighed and iced. They’ll be boxed up, heads on, and go straight to restaurants.
The others go on a table, where locals will make $25 an hour pinching the heads off. The heads become crab pot bait. The headless shrimp are cleaned again, sorted by size, iced and boxed up. Newman says it doesn’t get more fresh than that
“If you’re trying to eat healthy and not be full of chemicals and not wonder what your food is going to do to you 20 years down the road, I would certainly suggest eating North Carolina shrimp,” he said.
These shrimp all come from the Pamlico Sound, where most North Carolina shrimp are caught. Trawlers typically head 10 miles out into the inland water. But Senate lawmakers wanted to ban this inland trawling and instead keep it more than a half-mile offshore.
Sadley’s boat is about 45 feet and that’s typically the size of a boat that a trawler in North Carolina is going to be using. If you want to trawl out in the ocean, about a half mile off shore, Sadler says you really want your boat to be double this size so it can withstand the conditions that are out there with the rougher waters.
Fewer boats trawling offshore would mean fewer boats bringing in shrimp to markets like Newman’s. He buys from six trawlers and says none of them would be able to stay in business. The impact extends to dockworkers, headers, truck drivers and restaurants. Local shrimp replaced by foreign.
“Around here, you’re either a fisherman, a farmer, or you work for the county or state,” he said. “All the state jobs are taken around here except for the prison and if I had to go to work at a prison, you might as well be in there.”
A main concern with in-shore trawling is bycatch. That’s basically everything caught other than shrimp. Wildlife groups have claimed for every pound of shrimp, more than 4 pounds of other species are caught and discarded.
That figure is contested.
The net itself is designed to minimize bycatch. It includes a space that fish can swim through. The net even has a large space with grates that turtles can get out alive from.
“We catch a few fish, but not enough to hurt nothing,” Sadler said. “We’ve been doing this for 100 years in the sound and there’s as many fish now, as it was when I started,” he said.
“If we we’re doing all the damage they said we were doing, then they got to do something,” Newman said. “But we’re not.”
North Carolina Wildlife Federation president Tim Getwicki is adamant bycatch is a problem. That’s why he is pushing for a ban on bottom trawling where the estuary floor is scraped and the nets pull up everything in their path.
“We’re killing, in essence, hundreds of millions of juvenile fish every year before they have a chance to spawn, reproduce and support any fishing sector,” he said. “It’s kind of insane that this practice is still out in North Carolina and it is not practiced anywhere else on the Atlantic or Gulf Coast.”
In South Carolina, shrimp trawling is only allowed in the ocean except for short periods in the fall when trawlers can work in the lower areas of the Winyah and North Santee bays. Last year in Georgia, trawlers were allowed in the state’s territorial waters from the shoreline to three miles offshore.
Gestwicki says his group is sympathetic to how an in shore trawling ban would impact shrimpers. But he says he is advocating for the changes to protect North Carolina’s ecosytem long-term. He says shrimpers are strong and will adapt to the changes
“If we don’t, the way this is going, we’re nearing the point of no return on some of our stocks,” he said.
The shrimpers we spoke to doubt they’ll be able to adapt if these changes go through.
It’s in the hands of lawmakers if they will start trawling again in the summer. A bill to ban in shore trawling this year stalled after the House decided to not consider it. But the bill could always come back.
Newman says he is prepared to fight for his livelihood
“At some point, North Carolinians have got to decide whether they want fresh North Carolina seafood or not, and if they do, then we’ll be we’ll still be here,” he said. “If they want to eat from China, Venezuela, wherever, then we won’t be here. But I have a feeling that most people would rather have that fresh North Carolina seafood.”
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