Just Shrimping

OFF THE COAST OF ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.—All I could see on the smooth water was the uncertain reflection of the Sea Hawk’s lights and the faraway glow of five shrimp trawlers like this one. I looped my leg over the edge of the boat, breathed in the breeze that was still hot past midnight. Except for Chris, the captain, and his deck hand Jacqui, I was alone and miles away from the shores of Florida.

Chris was as small as a boy, though he was 41. On another shrimp boat, a battery exploded in his face. When he pulled out a piece of plastic, his right eye came with it. Now he wears goggles, which protect his glass eye and the other one, that one he cannot afford to lose.

Jacqui stepped onto the Sea Hawk with her boyfriend three years back, and the 39-year-old became addicted to the solitary ocean and what she calls its “serenity.” She ditched the boyfriend and kept shrimping.

These were exactly the people I wanted to spend the night with.

I first met Chris and Jacqui that evening. As the boat’s motor buzzed louder, so did they. I was reporting for the summer at a newspaper near Tampa. Jacqui reached into a paper bag and gave me her last sticky caramel. I asked her why a tattoo circled her right wrist.

“It’s a bear claw,” she said. “For strength.”

I looked at Chris’ arm. He had a Jesus fish.

Shrimping is a notoriously dangerous job. Shrimpers like Chris and Jacqui gamble their lives each night in the Gulf of Mexico, where they must avoid invisible rocks that rip the bottoms off boats. Lightning fries navigation systems, and storms sweep men off deck. Their only connections to the rest of the world are radios and unreliable cellular phone reception.

And the shrimpers themselves are notorious, too. After trying day labor and construction, they often drift to this profession, where there is no boss but the ocean. As we sped farther into the Gulf, Chris scrutinized the regional section of the paper. He wanted to see his friends’ names, he joked.

I worked with the people who photographed and wrote that section. They had told me to run background checks on any shrimpers I rode with. Sure, sure, I said. But I had already met quite a few at the docks. They were quiet folk, mostly men in their 40s who were skinny and smoked a lot. I didn’t look them up.

It was a sign of good faith, the same as entering someone’s home rather than staying in the safety of their doorway with a notebook as a shield.

Sometimes a reporter’s only insurance is her own trust.

At the end of the boat a little larger than a bedroom, Chris and Jacqui hovered at identical picking tables. Three bulbs shone on their bare hands as they flung the clear shrimp into bubbling tanks. They swept piles of sea grass, slick fish, red-ripe coral, and moray eels back into the water. Bouncing porpoises caught the chum.

But at 2 a.m. the machine that mixes oxygen into the water stopped pumping. The shrimp began to suffocate and turned white. Jacqui cursed. Chris scrambled under the deck to tweak the hot motor.

They would lose everything, hundreds of dollars of pay. Rather than selling their catch to a dealer, they would have to give it away to local retirees and pig farmers. Jacqui popped the heads off the biggest shrimp as they twitched under her thumb. “I’ll cook you some right now!” she said, glancing at her little gas grill. But since I was reporting, I had to refuse.



One week later, as I was writing my story for the paper, I looked at their records. In 1992 Chris has been taken in for aggravated battery, though his case was ultimately dismissed. Jacqui had been arrested on several charges of animal cruelty in 2001. “TORMENT DEPRIVE MUTILATE KILL,” read the arrest report. And these were not their only brushes with the law.

I didn’t care. I have their numbers. If I weren’t packing up today, I would call and ask to spend the night with them again, just to get another taste of what Jacqui liked to call her serenity.



April H.N. Yee ’08, a Crimson magazine and news editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Lowell House. She is not just tanning in Florida, or so she told her family.