In “A Shrimp Boat Blessing with no Shrimp Boats,” Gravy reporter 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.
Image caption: Small pleasure craft ride in the Bayou La Batre Blessing of the Fleet, a celebration of the local shrimping industry. Photo by Irina Zhorov.
Acknowledgments
Thanks for reporting help from Frye Gaillard.
Thanks to our audio engineer, Clay Jones of Broadcast Studios.
Music from this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions
Wahre
Discovery Harbor
Lobo Lobo
Dance of Felt
Dorica Theme
Tessalit
Alustrat
Toothless Slope
For further reading:
After the Storms: Tradition and Change in Bayou La Batre, by Frye Gaillard
In the Path of the Storms: Bayou La Batre, Coden and the Alabama Coast, by Frye Gaillard, Sheila Hagler, and Peggy Denniston
Preserving Oral Histories of Waterfront-Related Pursuits in Bayou La Batre
SFA’s documentary on Bayou La Batre’s Blessing of the Fleet
