Abruptly unemployed fishermen struggling to get by

HOPEDALE, La. — Manuel Meyer was forbidden from dropping his crab traps in the Gulf, and he couldn't just sit at home. He made his way to Breton Sound Marina, hoping to load up on orange plastic boom and somehow help corral the massive oil spill that could doom his livelihood.

He hadn't been called to work that day, but he figured he'd come anyway and try to make some money. After five fruitless hours watching other commercial fishermen load up and ship out, he had no choice but to leave.

"I don't know how I'm gonna feed my family. I don't know how I'm gonna pay my bills. We live week to week," the dejected 37-year-old crabber from St. Bernard said — still unemployed, fishing grounds still off limits. "How do you go home and tell your child, 'You can't eat today because Daddy didn't make no money?'"

For watermen across the Gulf Coast, waiting is now a way of life. Waiting to see where the slick that began after the deadly April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig will land. Waiting for crab and shrimp zones to reopen. Waiting to make some money.

It's a scene reminiscent of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which tore through fishing villages and seafood harvesting waters in August 2005.

Rob Canty rushed his shrimp boat shortly after dawn to a dock in Venice, where BP PLC was distributing boom to keep the oil out of untainted waters and fragile estuaries. By noon, he and his crew still hadn't been sent out.

"It's a lot of hurry up and wait," said Canty, 30, who spends weeks away from his Slidell home 110 miles away to support his family.

Flurries of activity turned out to be nothing — a delivery of bottled water, then a shipment of protective Tyvek suits for the fishermen to wear. Canty fell into an ice bin where shrimp are usually stored, injuring his ribs and back, but still was ready to go.

Not surprising for a man who once closed a gash on his hand with Super Glue instead of returning to shore.

After a while, a man in a BP hard hat told Canty there would be no work that day. The message was the same the next day. The man in the hat didn't say why.

"I need the water," says 32-year-old Jason Guidry, who worked for Canty until about a month ago, when he cashed in his retirement savings and traded his new truck for a shrimp boat. Guidry lives three hours away from Venice in Osyka, Miss., and still comes out, not knowing whether he'll be hired.

Shrimp prices are high, he said, because a long-standing push to limit imports finally got results. That makes the waiting especially hard.