PORT SULPHUR, La. — When Acy Cooper finished building a new 31-foot trawler, he had a problem: his wife had just given birth to their daughter. And it's tradition to name boats after a woman.
"So how do you do that and cover both of 'em?" he asked.
Cooper found a simple solution. He took his newborn daughter's first name and his wife's middle name and christened the vessel the Lacy Kay. That was in 1983.
For the next 40-plus years, the Lacy Kay was the main ship in Cooper's three-boat fleet, hauling in thousands and thousands of pounds of shrimp from the Gulf. But not this year.
These days, the Lacy Kay remains tied to the dock in Venice, Louisiana, about an hour's drive south of Port Sulphur, where Cooper is now piloting rented vessels, ferrying oil rig workers to and from the platforms that dot the Gulf. He's been shrimping since he was 15, working alongside his father before getting his first boat. He's still adjusting to having a boss instead of being one.
"I'm making money," Cooper said. "Not what I would be making, but you take what you can get."
He took the second job to help make ends meet after his fuel costs spiked more than half in just three months.
Diesel prices jumped from roughly $3.50 a gallon to more than $5 by spring, driven by the war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. For a shrimper already operating on slim margins, that's not just an inconvenience. It's an existential threat.
"You can't make enough money during this shrimp season in order to make it all here," Cooper said, snacking on a chicken wing in between trips to the oil platforms at the marina in Port Sulphur. "So we have to supplement our way of life."
To break even now, Cooper says he needs to haul in at least a thousand pounds of shrimp every trip. This season, that's been hard to do. He said a cold front in May pushed a lot of shrimp out to open water, and with no marshland left to shelter them — lost to decades of coastal erosion — he said they don't come back.
Even when the shrimp are there, the prices at the dock have collapsed. Imported shrimp, mostly farm-raised in countries like India and Ecuador, has flooded U.S. markets for decades. By 2023, imports accounted for more than 90 percent of American shrimp consumption. The U.S. Gulf fleet's share of the domestic market has fallen from nearly 30 percent in 1984 to just 4.5 percent in 2023, according to a report from NOAA.
Adjusted for inflation, dockside prices have fallen from over six dollars a pound forty years ago to under two dollars in 2023 — an all-time low. And Gulf shrimp revenue was more than halved between 2021 and 2023 from from $489 million to $221 million.
These brutal economics mean home-grown shrimpers like Cooper are becoming a rare breed. In the mid-1980s, Louisiana had nearly 20,000 shrimpers. Today, there are fewer than 1,400.
Blake Price, director of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, which lobbies on behalf of commercial shrimpers from North Carolina to Texas, says the industry was already limping before this year's fuel crisis hit.
"This industry could absorb an increased fuel cost a lot better if our markets were strong and hadn't been flooded with foreign, farm-raised product," Price said.
There were signs of recovery last year, Price said. Imported shrimp was subject to President Trump's tariffs — before they were struck down by the Supreme Court. Dockside prices ticked upward, and some shrimpers reinvested in their vessels over the winter, anticipating a more successful spring season.
Then fuel prices spiked. For large offshore freezer boats operating in the Gulf, a single 30-day trip can require between 9,000 and 12,000 gallons of diesel. Price said one Alabama operator told the Alliance he spent $47,000 on fuel before he left the dock — $20,000 more than the year before.
Shrimpers are pressing Washington for relief, including legislation that would stop U.S. taxpayer dollars from subsidizing foreign shrimp aquaculture operations that directly compete with American fishermen. The Save Our Shrimpers Act passed the House with broad support and is now awaiting action in the Senate.
The USDA recently created a new Office of Seafood, which Price hopes will open the door to assistance programs that have long been available to land-based farmers but never to the fishing industry.
"We're not asking for checks or a payout," Price said. "We just want a level playing field."
Cooper, for his part, voted for President Trump and said he supports the administration's broader goals — including the war with Iran. He said he's heard presidents talk for decades about confronting Iran's nuclear ambitions, but Trump is "the only one that's had the balls to do it."
Tossing his chicken bones into the water before hopping onto a boat to ferry another round of rig workers, he said the message he would send to Washington right now is simple.
"Help us with these fuel prices," he said. "We're farmers of the sea. We want something to fall back on when something like this happens, so we can be taken care of also."
Until something changes, The Lacy Kay will remain tied to the dock down in Venice, waiting for the winds and the math to change.
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