Montegut, La. — The Anna Marie isn’t your typical shrimp boat. To start, it has a full-size kitchen, air conditioning and satellite television. From his captain’s chair, owner Lance Nacio can plot his course and check water depth and tidal flows, all with the push of a button on a slick gadget not much larger than an iPad. But the most unusual addition to the Anna Marie is a set of high-tech plate freezers on its deck, which transform the boat into a kind of floating processor. With a crew of three, the Anna Marie can stay out at sea up to three times as long as a traditional shrimp boat, pulling in as much as 16,000 pounds on each journey.
The 40-year-old, with a doe’s brown eyes and a neat goatee, grew up shrimping the way southern Louisianians have for generations: He netted what he could and sold it fresh on the dock to processors and other middlemen at the market price. Today, Nacio catches and processes the shrimp himself and sets his own price. He is a savvy marketer, as comfortable (if not as happy) negotiating prices via cellphone or offering samples to celebrity chefs as he is out on the water. With customers including restaurants, Whole Foods Market and the famed Berkeley Bowl in California, Nacio has transformed shrimping into a sustainable venture, for the environment and his family.
“The shrimping industry in America has been struggling for a long while. Lance saw the writing on the wall,” says Frank Brigsten, a customer and chef-owner of Brigsten’s, the renowned New Orleans restaurant. “He is a visionary in his profession.”
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