gone shrimping A changing climate brings new catch to the Bay As we drove the truck out on the neck on a summer evening, I looked to the left to catch a glimpse of the creek over the phragmites grass. Beyond the reeds I saw a young man throwing a cast net off a skiff. “He says he can catch shrimp—real shrimp—in the creek, using his net and cat food,” my well-informed son told me. At that moment, clues that had been subconsciously accumulating in my brain for a year all stitched together into a cogent thought: There are edible shrimp in the Chesapeake Bay! When the boys were little, for fun we used to run a hand-net through the eelgrass in front of our house. We would catch and release small fish and crabs, snails, the occasional seahorse, and lots of tiny, translucent grass shrimp, each an inch long. A couple of times we gathered a few spoonfuls of these tiny shrimp, flash fried them, and ate them, shell and all. They turned fiery red and tasted a bit like crunchy sticks that had been dipped in marsh mud. Ketchup much improved the experience. But I sensed something had changed in the intervening 10 years. It seems the boys had grown and so had the shrimp. A friend had mentioned “big shrimp” skipping on top of the water when he worked his oyster cages. I recalled having seen what looked like shrimp off a dock on the Bayside the previous summer. I had also read that there was now an experimental shrimp fishery off the Virginia coast. I asked a few local watermen if they had seen these shrimp. Yes, more and more over the past five years, was the collective answer. The more I asked, the more I heard about people seeing these visitors to the Bay. There was a shadowy rumor that “a guy” had caught “two basketfuls” at the head of a creek to our south.
story & photos by Robert Gustafson ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com 68
June 2021
