Mount Pleasant’s scenic Shem Creek is dark and still. Dockside restaurants have long called it a night.
But Rocky Magwood is just getting to work.
It’s 4 a.m. as he takes to the large wooden wheel of his decades old shrimp boat and heads for the abyss of the Charleston harbor under the moonlight.
“You see Charleston in a different light that nobody else does right now,” says Magwood. “It’s quiet. Nobody’s upset with each other.”
A respite from the fight that’s engulfed his life washes over Magwood like the luminous, white cloud of birds he drives through against the black sky. At sea, is where this fourth-generation shrimper feels at home.
“Some of the places I work, somebody in my family has been there for over 110 years,” says Magwood. “They have been working that same area.”
But the century old family business is in jeopardy, as is shrimping along the entire coast.
Even as Magwood reels in a giant net of freshly caught, jumbo size shrimp, a tsunami of cheaper imported shrimp floods the market. It sells for as little as one third the price Magwood gets.
Meantime, costs for fuel and boat maintenance continue to swell. Many shrimpers have gone under. As many as 80 shrimp boats used to dock along Shem Creek, Magwood says. Now there are fewer than a dozen.
“If somebody would have told me it would have looked like this today, I’d never believed them,” says Magwood.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 90 percent of the shrimp Americans eat is imported, even along the coast.
So, this summer, the South Carolina Shrimpers Association, which Magwood heads, sued local restaurants they allege serve imported shrimp but falsely advertise as local. Some restaurants settled. Others denied the claims and appealed.
Ultimately, a judge dismissed the federal suit saying the shrimper’s association, a nonprofit, did not have standing. In other words, it wasn’t the right group to bring it.
“It’s just heart breaking, you know, to think that we didn’t get our day in court,” says Magwood.
Attorney Gedney Howe IV filed the suit and says it wasn’t about money.
“It was never about shaking people down,” says Howe.
“It was trying to get some safeguards in place to create a system that kind of regulates itself because its unregulated now.”
He says what shrimpers need is a truth in menu law, like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas already have. It requires restaurants to disclose where they get their shrimp.
Some foreign shrimp has raised health concerns. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration warns harmful antibiotics and preservatives have turned up in imports. And late this summer, the agency issued recalls for so called “nuclear shrimp” after imports from an Indonesian company were found to potentially be contaminated with a radioactive isotope.
And, just last month, the International Trade Commission determined that shrimp imported from Ecuador, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam does financially compromise U.S. shrimpers. A full report will be released in January and paves the way for more tariffs.
As local shrimpers wait for relief, Howe says he’ll seek help from the state legislature. His stepfather is a shrimper in McClellanville. He says they’re running out of time.
“It’s a piece of our culture that if we lose it, I don’t think you can bring it back,” says Howe.
Back on his boat, Magwood gets the call he eagerly awaits every morning. It’s from his wife and 7-year-old son.
“How your morning going bub?” Magwood asks as his son giggles through the phone.
Magwood grew up on a shrimp boat, but says he’s only taken his son out once.
“And the reason I’ve don’t is that I don’t want him to love this industry as much as I do,” says Magwood, as his eyes fill with tears.
“I don’t want to see my son struggle like I have.”
As Magwood heads back to the dock, he’s greeted by tourists and eager customers with money in hand.
“It’s a shame that not more restaurants support local shrimpers,” says Lewis Howard, owner of the Lowcountry Shrimp Company.
He loads up coolers of freshly caught shrimp to sell to restaurants and pop-ups in Mount Pleasant, Charleston, and Summerville.
Drew Dangerfield of Nashville also heads to the dock to check out shrimp boats. He grew up in Mount Pleasant and has been following the lawsuit locals call, “Shrimp Gate”.
“It’s kind of sad that people wouldn’t support their own community,” says Dangerfield.
“But I guess that’s the world we live in you know. How can you make a little bit extra of a dollar?”
At the top of the bridge, crossing Shem Creek, stands a statue of Magwood’s late uncle and legendary shrimper Wayne Magwood. He eyes it as he pulls in.
The likeness, looking over the creek, makes him proud and sad.
“To think that, you know, this could really be the end of it,” says Magwood.
“I might be the last one. That is heartbreaking to me.”
Like his uncle, Magwood says he’ll fight to save a Lowcountry way of life. He can’t imagine Shem Creek without a shrimp boat.
To learn more about which Lowcountry restaurants serve locally caught, wild shrimp click here.
