The Society of Shrimpers at Low Tide

The shrimpers don’t expect much, and they are happy with little: five or six shrimp of varying sizes in a half-hour, treading water in the bottom of a drywall-mud bucket.

The styles of humans casting casting nets vary. Among the casters, there are front-tossers, backhand-flippers, teeth-grippers, and lazy down-droppers. I spent twenty minutes in the WalMart fish section, reading the labels of the various casting net packages, after I had been tossing the net for almost a year, and I learned a few things. Backhand probably produces a perfect circle more often than forehand. Tossing high, above the plane of the body, is probably better than tossing on a level or tossing down. Most experienced casters do use their teeth to grip the net, as well as their two hands, but be warned that you can occasionally rip out a filling when monofilament catches on a something, or when a lead weight bangs into a tooth.

One-person shrimping here in the South is a matter of casting a monofilament net symmetrically-rigged with lead weights and round plastic guides for the filaments that rein in the weights. Monofilament nylon line is probably an improvement over the cotton netting that still is used, because thin nylon threads tend not to snag as easily as cotton ones on obstacles on the bottom (though they can be neatly severed by the sharp edge of an oyster shell). The object is to cast the net where you want it to go (that’s another whole question, one of aim) in a perfect O, as in a fly-cast for trout. Casting a perfect circle is harder to do, the larger the net, with a five foot diameter easier to put in a circle than a seven-foot diameter. Often the casting ends up in a crescent or a half-moon shape, which causes caster to curse or moan. The average Egyptian net-caster using the same technology 3500 years ago probably could fling a better O than we modern, technologically superior casters can. Monofilament line can have a tyranny of its own, catching on every little splinter as you carry it down the dock.

A perfect cast will drop to the bottom rapidly, surrounding all shrimp and fish inside. I have caught everything from shrimp and finger mullets on up to large rays and one notable gar, all in a cast net.

Shrimping is harder exercise than it looks to be. A Gullah woman with a soft lilt in her voice that sounded to me as if she had just arrived from Jamaica told me that she could no longer cast even a small seine because she had had metacarpal tunnel surgery. The motion swinging the lead weights out into an arc over the water several times in the course of a minute can work up a sweat quickly, and exhaust even a strong man after twenty minutes of casting. On the wharf at Beaufort, on the end near the bridge, at low tide you have to lean well out into space in order to pull up the net clear of the oyster shells that snag and can cut the filaments. That hurts your back. And at night it is hard to see what you are doing, leaning out over the oyster shells.

Another comrade of the wharf, a retired Navy marine engineer, told me and others in his audience that the shrimp flow in from the sea with the tide, around the point across the bay, in a huge S shape, following the current and the channel, bouncing off the underpinnings of the wharf in one place and then circling around the end of the wharf near the bridge. I have no idea whether he was right, but when I took my kayak against the outgoing tide, right next to the corner of the wharf, I ran into a strong current near where he said that channel was.

Shrimping at dusk, just as the lights come up on the water, was recommended to me by several of the regular shrimpers on the wharf, so I tried that, but my visit wasn’t timed according to the low tide, and I had only middling success.

One thing the shrimping gringo doesn’t know is that the squirmy translucent shrimp bouncing unpredictably on the tabby surface of the wharf can stab hell out of you. They do have a defense system, with spines sharp enough to penetrate a heavy-duty baggie. I’ve learned to pick them up from behind, so that they can’t stick a spine into my finger. One of the best tips I have received on how to handle them without being injured was from a kid from Charleston: he showed me how to pick them up by their antennae.

Shrimp are very good bouncers, among their other annoying habits, and they can flip their way out of the bucket just as they can flip clear out of the water when they are being chased by fish. It’s sad to return to a dock and see a shriveled dead shrimp who bounced out the night before.
Shrimping gringoes like myself have a hard time heading shrimp at first. The larger red sea shrimp, with their extended red antennae and their black inquisitive eyes on long stalks, seem to defy you not to take their heads off, but someone has to do it; otherwise, you bring home a bucket or a cooler of shrimp that just lay there and then die with their heads on. Actually now I just leave them in a shallow bucket of salt water until I am ready to boil them at home, rather than leave shrimp heads all over the dock or wharf.

But, after ripping their heads off, you have less sympathy for the no-longer-living organisms, and it may become easier to cook them. Friends who have lived here all their lives tell me there is calcium in the shells and that you should marinate the headless but un-peeled shrimp and then dredge them in flour and fry them in canola oil. This makes the shells soft, apparently, and it makes the tail end of the tail crunchy but not too sharp, so that you get very tasty, slightly crunchy shrimp to eat, and you get the calcium to boot. I am still not sure about eating the shrimp in their shells, though.

Shrimping at night on the wharf at Chambers Park, near the beautiful lights of the bridge, is worth doing for the company, for the good and bad advice, and for the shrimp. As one of the first people I talked to when I first visited Beaufort told me, "It takes a lazy man to starve, in Beaufort."