John Alexie can still live by his wits on the water, and brave hot and cold weather, but his day-to-day economic status is ruled by international markets he can't control. 'Imports are killing us,' he said. 'We're just getting by.'

Day One: Sunday, March 24, 1996 Way of life threatened along with Gulf's vast bounty Overfished waters running on empty Gulf on the Brink: Special Graphic Fishing family fears end of the line

Fishing family fears end of the line

By John McQuaid,
Staff writer

Small thunderstorms had kicked up all evening over the marsh, and a little after 11 p.m. the wind gusted hard out of the darkness and the grass started to bend and twist. In the middle of a push for shrimp, John Alexie eyed his radar screen and spotted a squall about four miles south, churning straight for his Lafitte skiff, the Lucky John.
His 10-year-old daughter, Shalane, stood at the deck mounted on the stern, sorting the shrimp and crabs from the finfish with a broad-bladed hand tool, shoving castoffs into the water. Alexie plopped her in front of the wheel.
``This is us,'' he told her, pointing to the radar screen, which showed the boat dead center in a narrow channel. ``Drive straight.''
``I can't see nothing,'' she said as she squinted out the window. Eyes on the radar screen, she rolled the wheel back and forth, compensating for current and breeze as her father pulled the nets partway up and secured them.
With Alexie back at the wheel, the Lucky John flew through lakes, bayous and channels, past pipeline valves and wooden ``No Trespassing'' signs that flashed by in the night. As they pulled into their slip in Lafitte a little before 1 a.m., rain started to sprinkle the roof of the cabin.
He can still give the slip to a summer squall, but lately Alexie's luck has been bad.
Early last year, he had problems with a fuel line that cost him a week of shrimping. Later, the net on one skimmer rig got caught on his propeller, twisting the boat around and popping the frame on the other side. All told, he dropped thousands of dollars in repairs and lost fishing days.
Then last summer, the Louisiana Legislature voted to shut down most gill netting - what Alexie relied on to tide him over once shrimping went slack during the winter.
That, combined with a mounting pile of other problems - competition from cheap imported shrimp, red tape, coastal erosion - has Alexie worried that his luck, and the luck of his family, cousins and neighbors up and down Bayou Barataria, may be running out for good.
``I had a Lafitte skiff since I was 12 years old,'' Alexie said. ``I been commercially fishing my whole life. I choose this life. I like to wake up in the morning, go out in the evening, watch the sun fall or the sun come up, the breeze and fresh air. That's how I want to live - that's how I want to end my life. I don't want to do it under a welding shield, or on a hot roof putting down tar paper. I don't want to do that.''
In the space of the past generation, the growing demand for fish everywhere in the world gave many small-scale fishers a ticket from the social margins to the middle class. But even as they climbed the ladder of success for the first time, the rungs began collapsing beneath them.
It is a painful irony to Alexie that although shrimp and other fish still teem in the marsh and the open Gulf of Mexico, commercial fishing today has the feeling of life in the twilight. It is dominated by anger over the present, fear of the future and nostalgia for the past - the life, now fading, of a fisher on a boat alone in the marsh.
The Alexie fishing franchise spans at least five generations. John, his father, Vincent, son John and brother Benny all fish. With skills honed by years in the marsh, Alexie has fishing down to a practiced art, tempered by his wry sense of humor and a rat-a-tat-tat laugh. A jack-of-all-trades in the marsh, he would shrimp from late spring into the fall, then fish with gill nets in the fall and winter. The net ban has limited his options, and he will be able to catch only mullet in another year. Lately he has switched to crabs.
Slack hours and small disappointments predominate in fishing. But all that can change in an instant. When skiffs converge on a spot where white shrimp are running, the shrimp will scatter across the surface of the water, like kernels of popping corn.
``You'll see 'em like rain. Sometimes they're jumping so much, nothing but water flies,'' Alexie said. ``I'm a person that lives to watch a shrimp jump. If you're with me on my boat at night and I got the spotlight in my hand, I'm going to watch the shrimp jump. To me, that's a thrill. With white shrimp it's spectacular because he's going to jump three or four times. Plenty of people would say `Oh, you foolish,' but if you're out on the boat and see what I see, and believe what I believe in, then you'd think it was something nice to look at.''

Alexie, who talks passionately about shrimping, sorts a catch aboard his boat, the Lucky John. 'I'm a person that lives to watch a shrimp jump,' he says. 'If you're with me on my boat at night and I got the spotlight in my hand, I'm going to watch the shrimp jump. To me, that's a thrill.'

Reacting to nature
Alexie's routine varies depending on where he is: He drops his skimmer rigs and pushes for a while, periodically pulling up the bag at the end of the net and sampling its contents, then dropping it back in. Sometimes he holds his position as the current - and shrimp - flow into the net.
Alexie sat at the wheel, pointing his small spotlight out the window at the surface of the water and the yawning mouth of the net. A few small jumpers, but not much else. Out in the Gulf, Hurricane Opal had rolled in a strange crop of fish usually found only near the beach or offshore - faintly glowing jellyfish and 3-inch sun perch and angelfish, even some brown shrimp, which were out of season. Hardly any white shrimp.
``You can't make soup out of that. I push for eight hours like this and all I'll get is a bucketful of shrimp,'' Alexie said after dumping the paltry take from a half-hour push onto the deck. With his sorting tool he quickly culled the few handfuls of shrimp from the pull and dumped them into another basket.

Dealing with change
Living off the marsh means dealing with a constant flux in day-to-day conditions. But lately the long-term changes have posed a tougher challenge.
Lafitte is no longer the small, isolated fishing village it was during Alexie's youth, but an increasingly popular haven for sport fishing and for suburbanites escaping the hassles of big-city living. The growth brings changes.
``In the city you cannot do what I'm talking about - leave your keys in your car at night, your front door unlocked when you go to sleep,'' Alexie said. ``There's not too many places you can live in where that's true. We used to do that and a lot of times we still do. But it's getting so now that plenty of people on this bayou are strangers to us. There's more and more people coming down here we know nothing about. I mean nothing.''
When Alexie was growing up, mud and prairie grass dominated the marsh landscape. But the intrusion of rising, saltier water caused by coastal erosion and subsidence, along with channels cut by oil and gas companies, has sculpted a different marsh, one full of open water and straightaways.
The erosion is slowly wiping out the region's prime fish habitat. Marsh rebuilding projects have sent river water and sediment flowing into the area. But that means fewer shrimp, which tend to flee fresh water. The change also has spawned huge clots of marsh grass, which favors fresh water - meaning a chronic problem with clogged nets.
``If this freshwater diversion ain't stopped, our livelihood is gone,'' Alexie said as he piloted his skiff past clumps of marsh grass.
Alexie can still live by his wits in the marsh, but his day-to-day economic status is ruled by international markets he cannot control. For almost a decade, they have been eroding his income as cheap imported shrimp catch the fancy of consumers and a growing share of the market.
``Imports are killing us,'' Alexie said. ``We're just getting by. Times are, we may not have the $5,000 on hand we need to tide us over through the winter.''
Nevertheless, he has managed to hold on to what he's built for his family. They live in a comfortable house he built, have a stake in the family camp and own two cars. After expenses, he netted about $19,000 last year, from shrimp, mullet and black drum. His wife, Vanessa, works as a manager in a discount store.

John Alexie's son Jay, 21, dropped out of high school to fish full time. He deckhanded for his father for a while, then got a boat of his own, though 'we tried to talk him out of it,' his father said. The boat sank when the young fisher hit some rocks, and the mostly submerged hulk sits in a slip near his father's, a project for another day.

Reams of rules
In the past decade, Alexie has had to hone new skills to deal with the volumes of rules state officials write to protect fish populations from the expansion of fishing: He must be a part-time accountant and paper-pusher if he wants to keep the law off his back.
The net ban has left Alexie with $5,000 in nets and buoys piled in his yard. Recently he had to throw away 500 to 600 pounds of black drum and speckled trout he caught while mullet fishing because he didn't have the right permits.
He ran into trouble when he tried to get all 12 of his licenses and permits renewed late last year, an annual ritual costing more than $800.
The rule changes that came with the new net law made that task even tougher. For 1996 licenses, he needed proof he was authentic - an accountant's statement that at least 50 percent of his 1995 income came from commercial fishing. But because the tax year wasn't over, no accountant would certify him. He had to give up days of fishing going back and forth to Baton Rouge to try to straighten it all out.
To Alexie and his fellow inshore fishers, the new restrictions have a punitive edge that goes beyond mere red tape. They feel as if the politicians and sport fishing groups have targeted them for extinction.
``Our boats, some of them is worth $30,000 to $60,000 apiece. What are we supposed to do with them if commercial fishing quits? Take them and put them in our front yard for a showcase?'' he said. ``We've got a heritage on this bayou, and yet in a few years the bayou won't have anything to do with commercial fishing if things keep going the way they going.''
Alexie's son, Jay, 21, opted to drop out of high school and fish full time. Alexie said he was always pushing him to be the best and catch the most, and perhaps he pushed him a little too hard at the beginning. He had Jay deckhanding for a while, then when he was barely ready Alexie bought him his own boat, which sank after Jay hit some rocks.
``I expected too much from him at first. At 15, he was a little bitty runt, no bigger than his sister is now,'' he said. ``When that boat sank, it was just as well for him.''
The hulk of the boat still sits partly submerged in a slip near the Lucky John's, a project for another day. For a while, Jay deckhanded on another boat, getting a 20 percent cut of the catch. Now he's out of the business.
Alexie's daughter Shannon, a student at Louisiana State University, married Rickey Matherne Jr., another shrimper's son, in December. His new son-in-law wants to teach college. But he also has a partnership in an offshore boat with his father, who wanted to bring him in as a captain.
Alexie pondered the options as he crouched in a duck blind near the family camp, a rustic six-room cabin on a spit of grass in the middle of the marsh equipped with pirogues, soft-shell crab cages, junk food and mosquito repellent.
``I don't know if I want him to do that, cause once he starts I don't know if he'll be able to stop,'' he said. ``It's tough. Those guys go out 20, 30 days at a time. That ain't no way to have a life of your own, a family life. Me, I go out two or three days at a time. I can be with my family, I can go out when I want. I have the freedom.''
That warm, hazy morning late last year, Alexie's shotgun jammed a few times and his aim was a bit off, so he missed several ducks he should have bagged. Maybe it was the impending changes - bachelor and bachelorette parties later that night for the bride and groom - or the recent equipment damage that cost him another $500, wiping out his $280 shrimp catch. Or hard times that seem both remote and imminent at the same time.
``We're living on the edge,'' he said. ``We're not high class, we're not low class. I'm not going to get no food stamps or anything. As long as we can be happy - come out here, do some hunting and fishing, make a living - that's all I worry about.''