Port Clyde fisherman Randy Cushman estimates his income from shrimp this season has been cut in half. Shrimp are abundant at sea but the market on shore has dried up.
“It’s not good when you’re sitting on a mooring and the shrimp are out at sea,” said Cushman. This year’s shrimp season is 180 days, up from the previous 150, but that won’t make any difference to him. “I used 31 days this season so far,” he said. “I’ve lost about half my income.” Shrimp season officially ends May 29 but for fishermen like Cushman, the season dropped off in early March when dealers stopped buying.
Maine cold-water shrimp are considered a delicacy by seafood lovers near and far. But this year sales overseas have slumped and fishermen are staying ashore, waiting for ground fishing season but unsure if that will be better.
“The whole shrimp season from day one has been a disaster and it’s due to low demand in the marketplace. We saw it happen with lobsters this past fall,” said John Norton, who runs Cozy Harbor Seafood on Union Wharf in Portland.
Cozy Harbor, a shellfish and finfish processor has stopped buying shrimp because it can’t sell it. “There are some bottom-feeders out there that are buying at extremely low prices,” Norton said, adding that for him, “it whacks our employees, the wharves, the fishermen.”
The market collapse is a new phenomenon, although the trend in recent years is falling prices. The catch itself varies widely, from less than one million pounds in 2002 to some 11 million pounds last year.
Maggie Hunter, a Department of Marine Resources biologist, said the resource is healthy, but the market is not. A shrimp dragger in March could land 400-500 pounds of shrimp per hour, but that abundance doesn’t help if Cozy Harbor and other processors aren’t buying shrimp.
One bright spot for those in the Midcoast Fishermen’s Cooperative was that group’s opening of its own processing plant. The plant began processing shrimp on March 20 (see “Co-op opens fish processing plant in Port Clyde).
But some wholesalers still have shrimp in their freezers from last year, Hunter said.
Norton, who founded Cozy Harbor in 1980, said he hasn’t seen such a “sudden and extreme drop-off” in fish sales since the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks when planes were grounded and lobster sails plummeted. Much of Cozy Harbor’s market is in Europe, and the British Isles are usually big shrimp customers. Until now. On top of bad economic news, the British pound has lost buying power against the U.S. dollar, resulting in a 30 percent price hike since last year.
The Brits just aren’t biting, and that, combined with dwindling demand in U.S. supermarkets, means the shrimp boats at Port Clyde stay on their moorings. “It’s absolutely worldwide,” Norton said.
It’s also very local. Cushman, who comes from generations of fishermen, owns a 45-foot wooden dragger built in 1975, and it now costs him some $1,200 per day at sea, for fuel and ice, to operate the Ella Christine. He remembers not so many years ago that operating costs were about $300 per day.
“The shrimp were beautiful, the market was terrible,” said Robin Alden, head of the Penobscot East Resource Center in Stonington, which supports the fishery. She said four boats there were fishing for shrimp, but only because of a community-supported fishery (co-op buying arrangement) in Stonington and on Mount Desert Island.
Alden said she believes fishermen will have to wait for the economy to rebound, but also need to “figure out new ways to get our markets back.”
Hunter, who works on shrimp at the Department of Marine Resources lab at Boothbay Harbor, said Maine needs to think about marketing all seafood, not just lobster. She praised the buy-local marketing model established at Port Clyde with help from the Island Institute, and a similar co-operative effort in Stonington.
Over the long haul, Norton is an optimist: “The industry will come out of this. The markets will return. After every winter comes a spring,” he said.