In search of spot prawns
It may be a humble one-room shack, but Pearsons Port in Newport Harbor houses some of the freshest prawns and seafood in Southern California. Here, owner Tommy Pearson prepares to head out for his 7 a.m. spot prawn run a couple of miles out in the Pacific. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
Keeping one eye on the horizon and the other on a GPS device, Tommy Pearson searches for a lost buoy off the Newport coast that marks the location of a string of shrimp traps he had set earlier. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
Deckhand Spencer Frohling takes a break after baiting and rigging all of the shrimp traps aboard Tommy Pearson’s boat, the Harvest. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
Frohling hangs over the rail, guiding Pearson toward one of their buoys. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
Frohling says a prayer before he and Pearson begin to haul in their 12 shrimp traps. On good days, they’ve caught as much as 120 pounds of spot prawns. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
Pearson and Frohling work in tandem to pull up a trap, which theyll quickly empty and place any prawns into an ice-water well in the middle of the deck. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
For bait, Pearson likes to use Friskies, preferably the “Salmon Dinner” kind. He says more traditional bait tends to get eaten by octopuses, which then scare off any shrimp. Friskies seems to have less appeal, and he keeps cases of it stored below deck. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
Spot prawns, despite their size, aren’t really prawns. They’re shrimp with pale-orange shells and snow-white flesh that tastes much like lobster. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
Spot prawns spawn from September through November, and fishing closes down from November through January to protect the hatch. There are only 30 fishermen in the state licensed to catch prawns, and because of the great care that goes into keeping them alive to preserve the quality, they can fetch a high price. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
Most California spot prawns are caught around the Channel Islands, but that would require a bigger boat than Tommy Pearson’s 26-footer. He sticks to the Newport Canyon area and trawls for prawns in spring and summer; come fall and winter, it’s time for spiny lobsters. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
One of Pearson’s traps pulls in a few prawns along with several urchins. He’ll end up with about 20 pounds of spot prawns, an OK day in what has been a slow spring. At Pearson’s Port, the shrimp will retail for about $13 to $19 a pound. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
