There is a distinct difference in the perception of the rights of the citizens to participate in the harvest of marine fisheries that differentiates the management philosophy of Louisiana and the National Marine Fisheries Service (and some other states). Louisiana’s Public Trust Doctrine provides that public trust lands, waters and living resources in the State […]
At the same time the Federal Government was developing a private fishery made up of super trawlers, the Louisiana Shrimp Fishery was going in the exact opposite direction: developing a small boat fishery with the participation based on democratic principles. The people actually involved in the fishery realized that the cost of harvest was more important […]
The Agencies and Institutions (A&I) needed the support of the shrimp processing factories and shrimp distribution companies and the shrimp fishermen to receive funding for their operations. Most fishermen considered government agencies and institutions involved in fisheries management adversaries, antagonist and the bureaucrats little more than welfare recipients. If the A&I would be responsible for […]
The Federal Government, the processing plants and the lending institutions were encouraging more and more fishermen to build bigger and bigger boats, with more horsepower, larger and heavier nets to trawl in the federal waters, that came to be known as super trawlers. Many super trawlers cost a million dollars a year to own and […]
Four Daughters It was in August of 1981, I was captain of the Four Daughters; we were trawling shrimp with the Four Daughters off the coast of Louisiana about six miles south of the Atchafalaya River. We had been out farther west around Vermilion Bay and were on our way back to Du Lac Louisiana […]
In the late 1970’s I was making good, shrimping with the Captain Atlas in the summer and fall, fur trapping in the winter and farming in the spring. Four Daughters In the winter of 1977 Gerald Mazerac approached me and presented me with a proposal to build two identical 62 ft. steel hulls on the […]
In the 1960’s, 1970’s and increasingly so in the 1980’s, the agencies in the federal government associated with the Gulf shrimp fishery encouraged and subsidized the building of large sea going vessels, particularly steel hulls to participate in the Gulf shrimp fishery. In Texas large shrimp processing plants were building fleets of boats that could […]
The Captain Atlas One of the hardest working, ingenious men that I have ever known was Atlas Lovell. Atlas was a small thin man made of muscle and bone that derived his energy from coffee and cigarettes; he was the best trawler on Bayou du Large. Atlas owned the biggest boat on the Bayou called […]
When I first went to Bayou du Large I was amazed to find the people speaking with an accent of Old England background; a boat was a boot. Almost everyone from about a mile below Falgout Canal were of English heritage but their subsistence life style of farming, trapping and fishing was similar to the […]
During the summer months in the early 1950’s I trawled out of Fourpoint in Terrebonne Parish with the first boat I owned, a 28 ft. flat bottom cypress skiff with a six cylinder Chrysler marine engine of 70 horse power and a 35 ft trawl net. The skiff was named The Crab. The Crab The […]