Trying to stay afloat

The traditional Lowcountry shrimping business continues to come apart like a fraying rope.

But some shrimpers are trying to piece together a future.

The commercial boats still operating today are at the docks, waiting out the storm-rocked seas and waiting on the fall "money" crop of white shrimp. They're coming off another spring of spotty catches and wholesale or "truck" prices driven so low by competition from imports that shrimpers in Louisiana marched on the Capitol and threatened to go on strike.

In the Lowcountry, the fall catch of white shrimp looks small so far, and that means a slimmer profit margin when the margin is already pennies per pound -- the smaller the shrimp, the smaller the price at the dock.

"You're going to have to catch a lot of shrimp to make some money," said Chip Racine, who was working on Jack Alexander's The Big Dog shrimp trawler. The boat was one of about a dozen tied up Friday at the McClellanville docks.

The spring crop of brown shrimp has been small for the past decade, a trend that S.C. Natural Resources Department biologists say is the consequence of mild winters.

The spring white, or roe, shrimp crop has been better. But those roe shrimp can't be too heavily harvested; the roe will be the fall crop.

To stay on the water, Lowcountry shrimpers are looking at ways to reduce costs and get a better price for the catch. The future that analysts see for them is to become their own markets.

But they're not ready to take on that end of the business.

'Getting nothing'

In South Carolina, if shrimpers can't sell fresh off the boat for a few dollars per pound, they're forced to truck the catch to processing plants in the Gulf states. The price delivered is 75 cents per pound -- minus the cost of freezing, packing and shipping. That's no more than 40 cents per pound in the pocket.

"The guys are getting nothing. They're out of work," said Kerry Abraham, a St. Helena shrimper.

Abraham, though, is hanging in there. Early on, he installed freezers at his dock and on his boat -- taking that first step toward processing his own catch, the "value added" approach to getting a better price, analysts say. When Abraham drops the trawl nets offshore, and the drag doesn't pull in a concentration of shrimp, he'll drop anchor and wait or turn and go in rather than waste expensive fuel.

He brings back both fresh and flash-frozen shrimp, and sells it year-round from a dock he owns. "It's the dock that puts you out of business," he said.

Rising dockage fees alone are peeling away shrimpers. Dock owners cater more to the lucrative yachting business or sell the valuable waterfront property for development. And it's at the dock that the horse-trading begins. Buyers set the price and middleman traders buy low and sell high later.

"Shrimpers are literally working their butts off and once they get to that dock, they get shortchanged. They're not getting top dollar from people who can pay it. From a modern business accounting standpoint, they have no idea what they're doing," said Baron Hanson, of RedBaron Consulting, who has worked with a Shem Creek shrimper.

"If they have to put it on the truck, they've lost," said Frank Blum of the South Carolina Seafood Alliance.

In McClellanville and elsewhere, shrimpers are looking at creating cooperatives to hold onto dock space. More and more, they're looking to sell that fresh shrimp right to the consumer. Abraham largely has been able to do that.

But the local retail market is small and fickle. Nearly all the 2 million pounds or so of shrimp that will be harvested before the year's end are going somewhere else. The way to make money catching shrimp is to bring it home in quantity. Despite demand, it's hard to sell a lot of fresh shrimp locally.

Most restaurants won't buy shrimp off the boat, sacrificing freshness to keep a better handle on volume and price. Abraham used to sell to a few restaurants near him. He quit. "The first shrimp prostitute who comes around and undercuts me by 5 cents per pound, they go with him," he said.

On top of all that, customer demand has fallen off with the economic downturn, Blum said.

'A little bit of cash flow'

The sprawling nets of a shrimp trawler are an icon of the Lowcountry, the sweet meaty catch being one of the joys of the place. But there are only half as many licensed shrimpers today as there were 10 years ago, and when the cost gets too high or the catch price too low, a lot of them just don't bother to launch.

They compete against an onslaught of cheaper, foreign, farm-raised product and Gulf shrimp, not to mention recreational shrimpers.

The future that analysts see for shrimpers is to become their own markets -- de-vein the catch at the dock and prepare customer-ready foods, such as shrimp salad, that can sell as high as $20 per pound. But after long days on the water, most shrimpers just aren't ready to take on that other end of the job.

"You have to catch shrimp. You can't catch shrimp and sell shrimp, (because) you can't put all your time in one direction," Abraham said.

The other emerging option is small-scale, custom shrimping closer to shore, even though the offshore jumbo shrimp might be the money catch.

Fred Dockery of Red Top is a crabber who takes a drag net just offshore when crabbing is slow. He works from a skiff, not a huge trawl boat. He's stays in shallower water than the bigger boats, where he pulls in the smaller shrimp and sells to individuals and retailers he knows.

"I can run out there, make one drag, and if I don't like what I see I can turn around and come back. It's a break from crabbing and a little bit of cash flow," he said. "It's not like I have a shrimp boat I'm paying dockage on."

And in days like these, when the shrimp are small, he said, "some days I'm the only (shrimp boat) out there."

Reach Bo Petersen at 937-5744 or bpetersen@post andcourier.com.