Despite the difficulties of 2020, fishermen are optimistic about the outlook of 2021 and beyond.
David Durio at his crawfish pond in Arnaudville, Louisiana, where he owns 60 acres of ponds. Kathy Bradshaw/Télé-Louisiane
By Kathy Bradshaw
Probably more than anything else, next to the loss of life caused by Covid-19, most people are mourning the loss of social interaction and group activities. Due to the coronavirus, we have had to cancel our festivals, our parties, and our main social events—upending life as we have come to know it.
Yet, crawfisherman David Durio is cautiously optimistic about the future of crawfish this spring. He says that the forecast of mild winter is a good sign for their abundance and size. And if his catches so far are any indication, things look promising.
Last year, interruptions due to Covid-19 led him to cut his fishing season short, because all the restaurant closures took a big chunk out of his earnings. And even though he was still able to sell crawfish to grocery stores and other “essential” businesses that never shut down, as well as making private sales to individuals and families, it just wasn’t quite enough. Selling a sack or two of crawfish so a few families can each have their own backyard boils just isn’t the same as selling 450 pounds of mudbugs to several local eateries.
“I shut it down in May, mainly because the price was to the point where it was low enough for me to get out,” he said. “It wasn’t worth it for me to fish anymore.”
Durio is a small-scale crawfish farmer. He owns 60 acres of ponds in Arnaudville and catches anywhere from five to 20 sacks of crawfish a week, compared to some of the big-time farmers who might harvest as many as 400 sacks a week from 300 acres of ponds. Since Durio works full-time as an IT specialist in Laplace, fishing is more of a leisure activity, a labor of love. He does it for the joy of the catch and his appreciation of nature.
“It’s just the outdoors, the wild,” he said. “Just being out with the birds and the alligators and the snakes. The adventure. It’s the warmth of the sun on you in the summertime, and staying all bundled up during the wintertime.”
For him, crawfishing is a family business that goes back many generations: His uncle owns 200 acres of ponds and also taught crawfish management classes at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Durio himself learned the crawfish biz from his dad, who used to bring him out to the ponds, even when he was little.
Durio learned how to crawfish from his father, who began catching mudbugs in the 1980s. Kathy Bradshaw/Télé-Louisiane
“I grew up out here,” he said as he tied up a sack of freshly caught crawfish. “My dad used to take my brother and me out here every Sunday afternoon because my mom wanted to get us out of her hair. From the time I was a kid, I [fished for crawfish] on a very small scale, just to play in the ditch and stuff like that.”
He explains that his family began commercially crawfishing after a lot of local cattle farmers got out of the cattle business in the early 1980s and converted their land to ponds instead. Later, when Durio’s dad retired from crawfishing, he passed the torch to his son. Now, Durio has been at it for fun and profit for the past decade.
“About 10 years ago, my dad had retired, and he asked if I was interested in doing the crawfish ponds, and I said yeah. It was like coming back home, and I loved it. I remembered all those little weekend trips, when he would take us out here.”
During lockdown last year, while most people were cleaning out a closet or catching up on their favorite Netflix series, Durio used his spare time in quarantine to get in some more crawfishing. When his IT job went remote, he took advantage of the flexibility and good WiFi hotspot connection to work right from his crawfish ponds.
“I’d come here in the morning, and I’d log in and have my 9:00 meeting,” he said. Then, he could bait a few traps on a coffee break, or sort a few sacks of crawfish during lunch. “I was putting in an eight-hour day. I was just doing it remotely. Really remotely.”
But with Covid, sales were still down, and the communal love of crawfish was faltering—surely because the communal aspect was, in fact, being completely removed from the equation. Eating crawfish is really about the crawfish boil—the “congregation and the collaboration between the individuals, just the fun of everybody getting together,” as Durio described it. Crawfish are the glue that holds people together this time of year, and crawfish boils are a rite of passage in Louisiana. But with gatherings and group parties forbidden and risky, it just wasn’t nearly as much fun.
“It’s almost like the price went low, and come May, it was like people were burned out on crawfish,” he said.
Durio uses traps like these to catch crawfish from his gas-powered boat. Kathy Bradshaw/Télé-Louisiane
Covid didn’t only affect Durio’s business, it also really hit home. Last March, Durio’s father contracted the virus. After spending two weeks on a ventilator, the 93-year-old Durio Sr. miraculously recovered, only to pass away several weeks later due to complications. To make matters worse, Durio’s father got Covid in the nursing home where he had lived, which turned out to have the largest number of deaths of any nursing home in Louisiana.
“When he passed, the funeral was one of the first days that they actually opened up the church to a large crowd,” Durio said. “So he had one hell of a send-off. Since he was a veteran, he had the full armored guard with a 21-gun salute. The church was packed, and he deserved that.”
It’s a new year now, and we’re just beginning a brand new crawfish season. And despite the fact that the pandemic continues to drag on, not all is lost for crawfish farmers nor people who love to eat crawfish. Durio, for one, seems to be kicking off 2021 with confidence for a good season. “I think there’s a lot more hope, a lot more optimism [this year],” he said.
Even if it still isn’t safe to gather in groups, and even if most don’t feel comfortable dining indoors at a restaurant, there are still plenty of ways to enjoy both the flavor and camaraderie of crawfish, such as at a drive-thru crawfish joint.
“People will still be craving crawfish; you’re just going to get them and boil them in your backyard instead of going and getting them at the local restaurant,” Durio said.
With more restaurants now open and doing business, restaurant patronage is certainly up from last year, and so, therefore, are the sales of crawfish. For crawfish farmers, this season looks hopeful.
“I talked to the lady who runs the bait shop here, and she says, ‘Oh, the restaurants are already asking for top dollar for crawfish,’” Durio said. “So, in that aspect, it looks like it’s looking better. There’s going to be more of a demand from restaurants. We’re still going to have the private sales. We still have the grocery stores—essential businesses.”