Darren Frickey, a fifth-generation shrimper, has been out all night fishing and is now preparing for his umpteenth shrimping mission before things get real bad. Thing is he says, scooping up a handful of medium brown shrimps known as “golden boys,” this year’s yield has never been better.
“There’s so much shrimp out in those waters. I was real busy before the oil spill hit the Gulf. Now we’re trying to catch as much shrimp as we can before the oil comes,” he explains aboard his boat, the Halania Juna, docked at the Rigolets Marina about the shrimp surge in Lake Borgne.
The big question is how long will the shrimping last?
Folks along Louisiana’s Northshore in St. Tammany Parish are nervous. A 45-minute drive north from New Orleans along the Causeway Bridge, this largely bedroom community of the Big Easy ain’t so easy these days with the imminent threat of oil spilling into Lake Pontchartrain, the US’s second largest saltwater lake.
