When you eat Gulf shrimp — and if you're on this coast, you'd better — you're tasting the work of a fishing culture that's been going on out here for well over a century. And its heart is a little place just west of us with a beautiful name: Bon Secour.
Bon Secour is French, and it means 'safe harbor,' or 'good help.' It's an old, old fishing village tucked up a river behind the coast, one of the oldest settlements on this whole shore, and for generations it has been the home port of the Alabama shrimp fleet. Those shrimp boats — you'll see them, big and workmanlike, all rigged with their nets hung out on long booms like the wings of some strange seabird — go out into the Gulf and drag for the brown and white and pink shrimp that these warm waters grow in astonishing numbers.
It is hard, salt-crusted, dangerous work, and it's a whole way of life — family boats, handed down, working the same grounds the grandfathers worked, coming home to that safe harbor to unload the catch on the docks. There's a reason 'Forrest Gump' set his shrimp-boat dreams on this very coast; the Bubba Gump of the movies was drawn from real Gulf shrimping towns like these.
And it's not just shrimp. This coast pulls oysters from the bays, blue crabs from the bayous, mullet and flounder from the shallows, snapper from the reefs. A whole working seafood coast, feeding the country. So next time a platter of fried shrimp or a pot of gumbo lands in front of you down here, give a nod west, toward Bon Secour — the safe harbor — and to the folks who still go out to the water every dark morning to bring it in.
Photo: PO3 Patrick Kelley · Public domain
