CRAYFISH

The onset of pale, gray December skies signals the end to another year’s crayfish season along this portion of the winding, orchard-lined Sacramento River.

A little-noticed retreat occurs as the last few homemade, wire-mesh traps are pulled from the river’s murky green water and placed in storage. Afterwards the handful of dingy, mud-splattered boats that work these scenic miles of rock-lined waterways are retired until spring.

Just as the crayfish disappear with the advent of cooler temperatures, the men and women who attempt to make a living collecting the bite-size shellfish from the river’s bottom also begin a yearly ritual of their own. They start complaining.

Their problem is fairly simple: Not many people in California have ever seen a crayfish and fewer still actually eat them. The inability to attract sufficient interest in these river-based shellfish means that the harvest must be shipped elsewhere, namely Europe. But the U.S. dollar traded strongly against European currencies during the past several years and there was little profit in cultivating overseas markets.

As a result, the boats which ply for crayfish on both the river and the delta to the southwest have dropped precipitously from more than 40 just a few years ago to far less than half that figure today.

To compound matters for this fledgling industry, flooding can noticeably reduce a season’s crayfish catch. Thus, the abnormally high water levels earlier this year affected the current harvest, leading one crayfisher to say that, overall, 1986 was a “lousy year.”

Still, there are projections of better paydays. Some, in fact, wishfully talk of a time when Los Angeles, the metropolis full of consumer dollars to the south, will be as dedicated to eating crayfish as is New Orleans, where the item is a virtual staple.

“My dream is to sell every pound we catch right here in California,” said crayfisher Alvin Stults as he motored up the river after removing his last 50 crayfish traps from the water. “The restaurants are ordering more and little by little it grows. We’ll see that day.”

Stults is one of the major players in the Sacramento River crayfish world, a business that goes on almost imperceptibly between the tiny river towns 30 and more miles south of the state capital. He owns Cliff’s Marina just outside of Freeport, and buys the palm-size shellfish from others to supplement the catch from his own 400 traps. He, in turn, sells live crayfish to wholesalers, processors and overseas buyers.

“We would be much better off if we could sell everything in L.A.,” he said while maneuvering a former houseboat that serves as his base of river operations back to the marina. “More people there should eat crayfish. Nobody that’s tried them doesn’t like ‘em. They taste like a cross between lobster and prawns.”

Stults’ optimism is based on a margin of substance. There are at least a dozen newly established Southern California-area restaurants specializing in the spicy Southern cooking inspired by chefs such as Paul Prudhomme, whose K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen restaurant in New Orleans created a host of imitators throughout the country. Dozens of other Los Angeles eateries also offer selected dishes influenced, or originated, by Prudhomme and his colleagues. And crayfish are one of the important fixtures in this distinctive cuisine.

But before any decided culinary shift occurs, the crayfish catchers will need more than just a national flirtation with Cajun and Creole cooking to fulfill their ambitions.

These three-inch-long shellfish resemble lobsters in appearance, but in no way share their ocean-raised cousin’s consumer appeal. In fact, many people who are familiar with crayfish, or crawfish, know them only as fish bait, not food. Equally troubling is the difficulty inherent in building the public’s appetite for an entity affectionately referred to in the South as “mud bugs.”

Yet, there is some reason to continue hoping because this lack of familiarity is mostly of a provincial nature. Crayfish attract quite a following in a number of quarters. For instance, the Swedes prize them simply steamed or cooked and then marinated with a brine and dill sauce. Prices in Stockholm can hover as high as $4 per crayfish preceding the annual Swedish festival honoring the crustacean, which starts the first Thursday of each August.

In French cuisine, crayfish are also popular and are often pureed into numerous sauces or used as edible garnishes. The inclusion of crayfish in sauces is much endorsed by Prudhomme, who wrote that the fat found on the upper tail is incredibly rich and can even be substituted for butter.

And there is also that hotbed of crayfishdom, Louisiana and other parts of the South, where tradition calls for steaming large numbers of “crawdads” with highly spiced water in oversize pots. The shellfish are then mounded on tables and become a nimble finger food as aficionadoes pick out the succulent, pink-white tail and claw meat often accompanied by six-packs of beer.

What people in these various locations have learned is that the eating is particularly good when the crayfish are from the Sacramento River. The species found in this area is larger than that from Louisiana, for one, and is also a cleaner-tasting variety because of exposure to constantly circulating water versus the more stagnant pond, swamp and rice paddy habitats of crayfish in the South.

Often, though, the edge the California crayfish has in quality is not accompanied by any further momentum. When European markets dry up as a result of currency fluctuations, there are few other outlets left for the product. And any inroads made by this state’s industry elsewhere in the country are frequently supplanted by suppliers from the South.

“The domestic U.S. market for the (Sacramento crayfish) is limited, partially because people don’t know how to eat them. But the product is beautiful,” said Steven J. Shimizu, owner of Pacific Crayfish Co. in Los Angeles. “It’s not inedible, it’s just that people need an education.”

Shimizu has been in the forefront of introducing crayfish to California chefs, but his modest breakthroughs have come from the persistence of door-to-door salesmanship.

“Here in Southern California, people are a little more open to strange things, and everyone I have introduced to crayfish has loved them,” he said.

Shimizu is one of several wholesalers who distribute California’s estimated current harvest of about 400,000 pounds in several forms, including live or frozen.

As indicated by the grumbling on the river, this year’s catch is down from 1981’s record total of 556,000 pounds, according to Darlene McGriff, a state Fish and Game Department official, who says that currency exchange problems and weather conditions are the major factors in the drop.

These numbers pale in comparison to the more than 72 million pounds that were farm-raised in Louisiana’s ponds and rice paddies last year. That figure is often complemented by as much as 30 million pounds of wild harvest from the Atchafalaya Basin, a freshwater swamp. The combined totals make crayfish one of that state’s most profitable agricultural products, according to Steve Gabel of the Louisiana Cooperative Extension Service.

In fact, Louisiana’s fishery generates $50 million annually and, as a result, the industry receives both financial and promotional assistance from the state government. Such a marketing subsidy places even greater competitive pressure on Stults, Shimizu and others to sell the Sacramento River harvest exclusively to large West Coast urban areas.

“We have to send the catch more than 6,000 miles (to Europe) to get rid of it, and the airlines make more money than anybody,” said Tom Olds, who has worked the river with Stults for the past several years.

Despite their litany of complaints, Olds and Stults are also possessive of their trade. Both are leery of press coverage because it invariably brings ill-equipped, novice crayfish catchers to the river.

“Whenever there is a story about this business, we get 70 phone calls from some retired guys with 12-foot aluminum boats that think they’re going to get rich on crayfish,” Stults said.

Fish and Game’s McGriff also notes that overcrowding has hurt California’s crayfish industry in the past.

“A lot of people thought that they could get rich and get a good suntan at the same time,” she said.

Such is rarely the case when the river becomes clogged with crayfish catchers. Stults, in his 15 years here, has frequently seen traps and other gear go up for sale quickly at giveaway prices after the bloom goes off the crayfish market blossom.

One of the reasons is that during the height of the season the river needs to be worked eight or more hours each day. It becomes clear that hoisting hundreds of traps from the water offers little in the way of an easy meal ticket.

The actual process involves checking the contents of numerous wire traps strung together in various locations along the river bottom. Most fishers join about 25 of the homemade mesh rectangles on a single strand of thick-gauge rope at intervals several feet apart. At the height of the season, the fishers hoist the traps into the boat, empty the crayfish into a size grader, re-bait the trap and then return it to the river bottom. Only market-size crayfish, about three inches in length, are kept on board while the smaller sizes are returned to the river.

The bait used most frequently is a pungent, liver-flavored canned dog food. The containers are pierced to allow the scent to lure the shellfish into the cages.

Stults estimates that on a good day this method can yield 1,000 pounds of market-size crayfish, which wholesalers then, in turn, purchase for about $1 a pound. In the Louisiana rice paddies and rivers, the catch is likely to be 2,500 pounds per fisher a day because of fewer size restrictions. But the price paid in the South for fresh crayfish is usually half of that offered for the Sacramento River variety.

There are plans to someday harvest what is estimated to be several million pounds of crayfish inhabiting the extensive rice fields north of here. One Sacramento firm, California Sunshine, which processes and packs crayfish primarily for the Swedish market, anticipates that some of next year’s catch may be the first to come from area rice fields.

“I think the popularity of crayfish should grow,” said Jane Rundquist of California Sunshine. “The interest in seafood is on the increase and, for us, it is just a matter of promotion.”

Even if Californians never fall in love with crayfish, Rundquist wouldn’t be too upset as long as the currency exchange between the U.S. dollar and the Swedish krona remains relatively stable. She said that for this year, at least, she had orders from Sweden for 10 times more than the 50,000 pounds she actually shipped overseas.

Back on the river, though, foreign markets are one of several things to complain about. Pam Pickett, the only woman to operate her own crayfish boat, summarized part of her disappointment in 1986 by laughing and then saying, “If they made work gloves the size of women’s hands I’d be OK.”