In Louisiana, the months between March and June are just as exciting to some as Christmas. Springtime means crawfish season is at its peak.
To most people, crawfish only exist on a platter or in a boiling pot. But those destinations are the end of a long process the crustacean goes through before being eaten.
First, the crawfish must be caught in a specialized, controlled pond. These exist all across the state, tended to by thousands of fishermen. These ponds account for a majority of the crawfish harvested in Louisiana. In 2011, the ponds brought in more than 100 million pounds of crawfish, harvested by a statewide total of 1,260 farmers.
One of these farmers is Glen Leblanc. Leblanc has been in the business for the past 20 years, though it’s not his day job. He works at an aluminum plant and said he got into crawfishing because he needed a relatively easy way to make extra money to support his family.
Leblanc begins by setting pyramid-shaped traps with fish bait in them. He’ll go back to check them about 24 hours after they are set. In early and mid-February, the traps are nearly empty, but Leblanc remains optimistic the traps will be filled to the brim with mudbugs beginning in March.
“That’s the tricky thing about this business, the unpredictability,” Leblanc said. “We’ve had years that were supposed to be good that turned out to be disappointing, and vice versa.”
Leblanc’s right about the unpredictability. In March, his traps only turned out a bit more crawfish than they did in February. From fishing the whole lake, he was able to fill around two and a half sacks, each about 30 pounds. He said on a normal day during the peak of the season, he can haul in about six or seven sacks.
“They’re going to start biting when they feel like it,” Leblanc said. “It can really change overnight. I can come out and get two bags a day for a week, then come back the next day and start getting six bags out of the pond.”
Leblanc isn’t a typical crawfisherman. A resident of Lutcher, La., he fishes exclusively for Miko’s Seafood, a local restaurant and market. Regular crawfishermen, Leblanc said, work as freelancers of sorts, fishing in public waterways and selling what they catch to restaurants around the state.
Working for a specific restaurant allows Leblanc to do the job on his own time, as well as saving him the trouble of needing a commercial fishing license, which isn’t necessary for fishing private ponds. The owner of the restaurant, Miko Roussel, owns a number of crawfish ponds that he uses to supply his business.
The advantage of the ponds is that they’re a highly controlled environment. Leblanc’s harvest of crawfish is rarely ever affected by outside forces such as weather or man-made issues. During the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, for example, Leblanc said he and his fellow fisherman never saw a dip in the number of crawfish they collected.
“The media really blew that one out of proportion,” Leblanc said. “The spill was bad, for sure, and I know a couple guys who were hit hard by it, but it really wasn’t that bad for most of us.”
Despite the slow start, Leblanc said this season is forecasted to be a good one. At the beginning of March he was making about a dollar per pound, while the freelancing crawfishermen were making about 50 cents per pound selling to Miko’s.
