One man’s ‘trash’ fish, another’s living

By Robert Zullo
Senior Staff Writer

Published: Sunday, March 15, 2009
 

BAYOU SAUVEUR — The fish on the line looks like a sea monster, a tubby
green-and-silver torpedo bristling with teeth.

Garfish are large with sharp teeth and tough hides, making them challenging
to catch and clean.

Ricky Verrett hits an alligator gar in the head with a hammer to kill it so
it will not bite him during a fishing trip Tuesday south of Theriot.

Barefoot on the deck of his small fishing boat, 44-year-old Ricky Verrett
lurches ever so slightly as he snatches a soda-bottle float out of the water
and feels the fish’s weight on the attached hand line. His legs and waist
press against the gunwale, tugged by the nearly 100-pound alligator gar at
the other end of the line. With his right hand, Verrett pulls the fish
closer to the boat.

With his left, he picks up a rusty claw hammer.

A flurry of deft, quick shots to the thrashing gar’s thick skull, more or
less unchanged since the Jurassic Period, sends a splash of blood over the
brownish waters of Bayou Sauveur, an area of salty shallow marsh southeast
of Bayou Dularge.

Verrett, about 5 feet 8 inches tall, tanned, wiry and strong, hooks the
hammer’s claws into a fold of skin under the jaw and hauls the fish aboard,
dumping the gar into a long, white plastic tub beginning to brim with the
fish’s fallen comrades.

The fisherman unties the heavy string from the wire leader still hooked in
the gar’s mouth and tosses the line and float into the back of the boat.

He returns to the wheel and scans the water for the next two-liter bottle,
which are spray-painted bright orange, hoping to see one pointed straight
down or being towed across the water, sure signs a fish is hooked.

“It’s fun fighting those big things,” Verrett said.

For most of his life, like his Native American ancestors, Verrett has made
his living from the natural bounty of the waters of south Terrebonne.

‘THEY’RE NOT TRASH’

While he also takes to a trawler for south Louisiana’s two shrimp seasons
and keeps a crawfish pond, his steady income comes from the alligator gar, a
hardy, sluggish, wide-ranging species not generally known as a culinary
delight.

“That’s what a lot of people think, that it’s a trash fish. Not to me;
they’re not trash,” Verrett said.

He usually puts out 50 lines along the waterways south of Dularge in the
late afternoon and returns early the next morning to pull them in. Like any
other type of fishing, some days are bad, others are not.

After a trip Tuesday, accompanied by a Courier reporter and photographer,
Verrett caught 24 gar. Once they were cleaned, a laborious task that
involves hatchets, machete-like knives and screwdrivers to contend with the
gar’s bony scales, Verrett was left with 552 pounds of the thick meat. The
price for garfish meat, which resembles bloody slabs of beef more than fish
filets, fluctuates anywhere from $2 to about $2.50 a pound, he said.

By Wednesday afternoon, all of it was sold, most to an Opelousas fish-market
owner, Verrett said.

During the Lenten season, when devout Catholics forswear meat on Fridays,
the demand for fish is high, and there are comparatively few other local
fishermen hunting the gar, Verrett said.

“Me and my daddy are the main ones,” he said.

‘MIGHT NOT LOOK APPETIZING’

Allyse Ferrara, a professor of biology at Nicholls State University, said
Verrett has been “invaluable” as she and her students study the local gar
population’s age, reproductive cycle and size.

“He goes out of his way to help us,” she said.

Ferrara said the reptilian-looking gar, an evolutionary success story that
has been around for more than 150 million years, can grow to a maximum size
of about 9 feet and weigh more than 300 pounds.

“That’s pretty old,” she said. “That’s why we say that they got it right
early.”

Gar can flourish in poor water quality and can adapt to high salt levels,
Ferrara said. Because of a specialized swim bladder that resembles a
primitive lung, they can survive out of water for hours and breathe air from
the surface in the hot summer months.

“Their gills are less efficient in hot water, so they have to air-breathe,”
Ferrara said. “It’s almost like a sucking sound. … It’s neat to see.” They
eat virtually anything, from nutria to crabs, but mostly feed on other fish.

As far as taste, Cajun recipes abound for the “poisson arme,’ ” French for
“armored fish.” Most common are garfish “boulettes,” or fried fish balls.

“They might not look terribly appetizing,” Ferrara said. “I love it. It has
a slightly fishy flavor. I don’t find it overpowering. … It’s a very sturdy
meat. You can cut it up and sauté it or put in a sauce and it doesn’t fall
apart.”

However, with their fearsome, prehistoric visage, gar are not the most
lovable fish, Ferrara said. And for years in some states they were killed
indiscriminately as a nuisance fish.

“Unfortunately, people used to believe that gars were bad for other
species,” she said.

The fish have been listed as a vulnerable species by the American Fisheries
Society. Louisiana is one of only two states in the country that do not
regulate gar fishing. Texas, the other, is weighing imposing a limit on
recreational gar fishing.

For commercial fisherman like Verrett, there is no limit on gar, according
to Capt. Sammy Martin, a Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries
agent. Anglers must comply with the same gear- and boat-licensing
requirements as other fishermen, however.

Rather than overfishing, habitat loss due to coastal erosion may be the
biggest threat to the local gar population, Ferrara said.

“If we can maintain our habitat, we should be able to harvest gar
recreationally and commercially,” Ferrara said. “But we don’t want to see
the harvest increase.”

‘I LIKE TO FISH’

Little of what Verrett catches goes to waste. The guts and other organs are
saved for crawfish bait. The heads, fins and tails go in the bayou to feed
the crabs. But the gar’s hard, arrowhead-shaped scales, one of the fish’s
more unusual features, are preserved in giant piles by the debris-strewn,
covered dock on Bayou Dularge Road where he cleans the fish.

Verrett’s cousin, Janie Luster, also of Dularge, makes jewelry and
traditional Native American crafts from the bony scales, which she sells at
the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, among other events.

“They love the garfish,” said Luster, 56, who grew up on the bayou as a
member of a fishing and trapping family.

She brought Verrett, who ventures out of Dularge rarely and suffers shoes
with even less frequency, to a recent festival so he could explain to her
customers where the scales come from.

“You need to see how people are fascinated with the garfish scales,” she
told him.

The sandals he had worn were off by noon.

Luster describes her cousin as a “traditional person” who loves life on the
bayou too much to move anywhere else.

Verrett’s brother Curtis Verrett Jr. puts it a different way.

“He lives like a hobo,” Curtis Verrett said. “He stays on the boat and he
makes money, yeah.”

Ricky, who grew up in Dulac but moved to Dularge as a teenager, stays on an
old trawler and doesn’t own a car.

He is not married — “Too much trouble. I like to fish too much,” Verrett
says — but has an 8-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter he supports with
his fishing.

“It’s just a way of life that there’s so much freedom to it. I don’t think
Ricky is stressed by everyday life,” Luster said. “He just has the freedom
that few people can really enjoy.”

As he hacked off the head of a gar Tuesday afternoon and peeled off strips
of scales, Verrett was asked what he would do if he couldn’t fish.

He smiled.

“Probably die,” he said, before reconsidering. “(Or) go get me a woman with
money and do the cooking and cleaning.”