Maine shrimp fishermen say buyers scarce ‘Nobody’s buying nothing’

PORTLAND – The shrimp fishing season has barely begun, but it’s already over as far as Maine’s shrimp fishermen are concerned.

After several down years, the shrimp population in the Gulf of Maine is strong again, and regulators gave fishermen a 140-day season – which is twice as long as last year’s. But fishermen say nobody’s buying the catches they bring to shore.

Branimir Viducic, the captain of a 65-foot boat in Portland, said he couldn’t even give away the catch from his last trip. So he took a full crate of shrimp to the beach and tried to feed it to the birds, until somebody told him he couldn’t do that either.

Viducic started shrimping in 1967, but has never seen anything like this. His boat hasn’t been out since Jan. 2.

“Nobody’s buying nothing,” Viducic said.

This was supposed to be a comeback year for the shrimp fishery, with Gulf of Maine stocks at high levels and fishermen given a long season to catch them.

At the same time, however, fishermen feared they might not have enough buyers for the product, at least early in the season. But fishermen and fish dealers say it has been even worse than expected.

With an oversupply of shrimp worldwide and a string of small and inconsistent catches in New England in recent years, Gulf of Maine shrimp have little value nowadays. Prices in Portland collapsed to 10 cents a pound earlier this month.

“Shrimp was going to be a bright spot on the horizon, (but) it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen,” said Hank Soule, general manager of the Portland Fish Exchange.

Northern shrimp provide a small but valuable fishery to the New England states. Last year, an estimated 200 or so boats fished for shrimp, roughly three-quarters of them from Maine with the rest coming from New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

When the shrimp industry peaked in the mid-1990s, the harvest exceeded 20 million pounds and there were plenty of buyers along the Maine coast. But after the stocks fell, processors fell by the wayside and markets for the small, sweet shrimp evaporated.

Shawn Merry, manager at Plant’s Seafood in Bath, said he’s taking a pass on shrimp this year. Although he has sold a lot in past years, people have grown accustomed to the unpredictable supply, he said.

“They really aren’t asking for it. The restaurants aren’t even asking for it,” Merry said.

The shrimp are available at some retail seafood markets that have contracts with guaranteed prices for individual fishermen or with small-scale suppliers.

“For us to get (shrimp) we have to contract a boat, so we’re paying more just to get it in our store,” said Ben Lindner, manager of Fishermen’s Net in Portland. The store was selling 10 pounds of whole shrimp at 89 cents a pound, or one pound of shrimp meat for $4.99.

Shrimp season began Dec. 12 and runs through the end of April – on paper, at least.

Viducic said his buyer told him he might as well take the shrimp net off his boat and store it away. He said he will use some of the fishing days he was saving for spring and go look for haddock or other groundfish to pay the bills this winter.