A Shrimp Boat Blessing with no Shrimp Boats

In “A Shrimp Boat Blessing with no Shrimp Boats,” Gravy producer Irina Zhorov takes listeners to Bayou La Batre, on Alabama's Gulf Coast. Long known as the seafood capital of Alabama, Bayou La Batre has hosted a Blessing of the Fleet – a festival to bless local commercial shrimp and fishing boats – since the 1940s. 

Fishing has long been a dangerous and capricious industry, where luck – in harvests, weather, accidents – has almost as much to do with a captain's success as his skill. The annual blessing, an old European tradition established in Bayou La Batre by a Catholic family of transplants from Louisiana, was a bulwark to ever-present risks. Shrimp boat captains would decorate their boats with festive flags and parade along the bayou, receiving a blessing from the Archbishop of Mobile, a little courage to go back out to sea. 

But as the industry changed and evolved, what the Blessing could do seemed less obvious. Boats were built bigger and with refrigeration, so people could stay at sea longer and bring in bigger harvests. At the same time, systemic threats emerged to the shrimping industry. Competition from imports and farm-raised shrimp is keeping shrimp prices unsustainably low while prices for gas, insurance and maintenance grow. The Blessing hasn't kept up with the changes. Many captains are too busy hustling for economic survival to show up. Not a single commercial shrimp boat attended the 2023 Blessing of the Fleet.    

In this episode, Zhorov talks to Vincent Bosarge, Deacon at St. Margaret's Church, which hosts the Blessing, who grew up going to the festival; Rodney Lyons, a fisherman whose family once supported the Blessing by donating food but who no longer attends; Jeremy Zirlott, a younger shrimper who says he's struggled to make ends meet in the industry's current state and who's never put his boats in the Blessing; and Tommy Purvis and Kimberly Barrow, who shrimp on the side but for whom the Blessing is a vital tradition. 

Acknowledgments

Thanks for reporting help from Frye Gaillard, and thanks to our audio engineer, Clay Jones of Broadcast Studios.

Gravy is proud to be a part of APT Podcast Studios.

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