Roy Gaudet, 74, started crawfishing full time when he was 9

05/20/2001

By Glynn Wilson / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

PIERRE PART, La. – Crawfisherman Roy Gaudet waited patiently in his carport on a recent morning, surrounded by hundreds of onions from his garden.

He usually launches his 17-foot aluminum boat at dawn, but he was waiting for a couple of visitors who wanted to ride with him.

Dave Stueber / Special to the DMN Roy Gaudet runs and baits traps every other day during crawfish season.

"I've been doin' this for along time," Mr. Gaudet said as he put his boat in the water. "I can't even remember what it used to be like. It's always been hard."

When Roy Gaudet first started catching crawfish full time, FDR was president.

At 74, Mr. Gaudet is the oldest living bona fide Cajun crawfisherman still working the bayous of the Atchafalaya Basin, said the owner of Mike Blanchard's Seafood, who buys Mr. Gaudet's catches.

Mr. Gaudet has seen good years and bad. This year might be pretty good, better than many had expected.

"We could have a great season," he said, maneuvering the custom-made boat through the swampy labyrinth, "if the Corps of Engineers would give us some more water down here."

The Corps controls the flow of water in the Mississippi River basin, mainly to ensure navigable waterways for commercial barge traffic. On this day, the river stands 4 feet below the white marker on the cypress trees indicating the optimum water level.

After the drought last year, no one expected much from the crawfish season of 2001. But the rains picked up this winter, and retail prices have fallen from a high of $4 a pound last year to $1.99 cooked in New Orleans this year, just in time for semester-ending crawfish parties this spring.

"The crawfish are here, better than last year," he said.

Skilled provider

"What English I know I learned from my kids, and da TV," he said with a rich Cajun accent. "I don't know how to read much."

Crawfishing with Roy Gaudet • More about crawfish and Cajun culture • Extra content index

Because there's no retirement fund for crawfishermen, no withholding system for income taxes or Social Security, Mr. Gaudet has to keep running and baiting the traps every other day during crawfish season in the spring – when the water's high enough. When it gets low in summer, he runs trotlines and switches to catfish to put food on the table for himself and his wife of 53 years. He crabs and hunts deer and squirrel a little, but just to eat, not sell.

He also grows a small garden at his modest home in Pierre Part, near Morgan City, a few minutes drive from his favorite boat launch on Old River. To get into the bayous where he nails his wire traps to trees, Mr. Gaudet has to steer his boat over or around floating logs and treacherous stumps, some hidden in the muddy brown water. He has been known to bounce off a tree or two along the way.

He knows where the stumps are, like a Mississippi steam boat captain knew the sandbars.

His wife and son might have a hard time finding him this far in the swamp, however, if something went wrong. Still living in a culture that dates to the 1700s – when the Cajun people were exiled from New Acadia (Nova Scotia) by the British for refusing to swear allegiance to the Crown – he doesn't carry a cell phone.

If the Corps doesn't release more water from the massive control structures upriver soon, he won't be able to get to these traps.

"Two more weeks and you won't be able to fish here. It's a long way to go for a pirogue," he said, grinning a little from under his well-worn fishing cap, mumbling something into the wind in his native form of French.

A pirogue is a Cajun boat much like a canoe, only wider, a wooden boat paddled into the swamps in the 1930s before aluminum and electric motors came along. They are still used occasionally, when the water level is unusually low.

Today, like bass fishing, shrimping and crabbing, trapping crawfish has its own custom-made equipment. Metal traps with two funnels in the bottom allow the mud bugs in, but not out. Some get trapped with their tails hanging out and are eaten by mud cats, the term they use down here for catfish.

Mostly the crawfish are attracted by the poker fish, a bait fish, one per trap, sliced down the middle to make them easier for the crawfish to eat. Or the crawfish bait pellets, two to a trap, made from fish detritus.

A special metal grading table makes the sorting and sacking easier. At one end he attaches two porous, purple sacks.

Checking the traps

He quickly sorts out the dead crustaceans and tosses them back into the water to be eaten by other underwater scavengers.

While he's rebaiting the trap and hooking it back on the tree, marked with his signature orange-and-white paper flag, the angry mud bugs march right into the sacks like cattle to the slaughter house. Some go head first, as if the hollow place at the end of the table meant freedom to fall back in the water, where they hang on the trees just below the water line. Others stand on their tails and march backward, their eyes bugged out, front claws menacing the air.

After two or three days with bait, each trap picks up about 50 to 100 crawfish big enough to cook. In this circular path through the swamp, Mr. Gaudet has 75 traps. It takes about three hours to run through it, and luckily, there are no cottonmouths, copperheads or gators in site, and only one nutria.

Mr. Gaudet said he once was bitten by a copperhead while reaching to set a trap. He finished his rounds, then hurried to a hospital, making it just in time, the doctor told him.

The most dangerous part of this business involves dodging dead trees, which tend to fall when the wind blows hard.

The stumps and logs hidden in the murky brown water pose a risk, especially to the $5,000, 70-horsepower Yamaha motor mounted on the back of the boat. The motor has to be raised and lowered every few traps to traverse another natural obstruction. Sometimes he pulls himself over logs with a long pole with a hook on the end.

"Some people seem to think we make a lot a money doin' this," he said.

He gets 75 cents a pound from his cousin Mike Blanchard, who has 40 crawfishermen and others working for him, many of them named Blanchard. Mr. Blanchard runs the crawfish into New Orleans almost every day to the Big Fisherman on Magazine Street.

On a really productive, long day, Mr. Gaudet could potentially fill his boat with eight sacks, the most his little boat would hold. At an average of 42 pounds per sack, that would be $252 a day, every other day, as least in season.

But with the price of oil, gasoline selling for $1.69 a gallon and going higher, and bait and equipment costs always on the rise, the net take is not enough to make a man rich.

"I make a living," he said, "and dat's about it."

The farm-raised crawfish season potentially runs from November to July. More realistically, the wild crawfish season runs from January through June, "depending on the weather," said Henry Poynot, owner of the Big Fisherman. "We've had them in October, but that's rare."

This year, more crawfish are coming from the wild than ponds because of environment and health problems with the farms. Crawfish farms are beginning to face problems of infectious bacteria and the buildup of pesticides.

A job, not an adventure

Nor does he pause to notice the blue herons, brown pelicans, red-winged black birds, hawks, owls or woodpeckers along the way. To him, this is a job, not an adventure.

He also stays on the lookout for signs of trap thieves. A man who would stoop to robbing another man's trap is considered the lowest form of criminal in Acadia.

"I couldn't do dat," Mr. Gaudet said. "The man upstairs, he's always watchin.'"

Aside from the water level, snakes, falling trees and the price of gas and bait, Mr. Gaudet most worries about the kids of Acadia.

Just like the children of shrimpers and other long-standing commercial fishing industries on the Gulf Coast, it will not be financially possible for them to follow in the footsteps of their parents.

"It's a rough time for fishing," he said, peering off into the distant swamp. "It's always been tough. But now, whewey. The kids, they got to go to school."

Glynn Wilson is a free-lance writer based in New Orleans.