Photo: huggingthecoast.com food blog/Flickr

Shrimp baiting may be nasty and expensive, but for the shrimp festival in Yemassee, S.C., it's cause for celebration.

Crowds will converge upon the low-country town this weekend to feast on shrimp gumbo, meet Miss Yemassee and pay tribute to shrimp baiting. But even Lori Poston, who's chairing the 16th annual festival, cops to being slightly ambivalent about the peculiar regional practice of using a mix of clay and fish meal to lure thousands of wriggling shrimp.

"It stinks to high heaven," Poston says of the traditional bait. "It's the stinkingest thing you ever smelled. When my husband comes back from shrimp baiting, he takes his clothes off at the door."

Shrimp caught using bait don't return in much better shape than the shrimpers, she adds.

"The vein's the main thing," Poston says. "The meal gets into the shrimp and you have to clean the veins. It's nice when you can just free cast without bait."
Still, more than 6,000 South Carolinians every year purchase licenses to shrimp with bait. Savvy shrimp baiters can net more than 1,000 pounds of shrimp over the two-month season, although the price per pound has risen in recent years along with the cost of equipment and fuel.

"The cast net has gotten outrageous," Poston clucks. She suspects the recession may be to blame for the steadily declining numbers of licenses issued annually: The hobby apparently reached its peak in 1998, when the state issued 17,000 licenses.

Back in the early 1980s, when folks in South Carolina first started baiting their shrimp, no licenses were required for the vaguely unsporting solution to small shrimp yields -- mostly because no one bothered with it. While local shrimpers had experimented with bait, they'd never quite sussed out the shrimp palate until a group of stunningly successful baiters from Florida showed up in Yemassee. The secret to effective bait, the Floridians whispered, was dog food.

The South Carolinians decided to do their shrimp one better, and mixed their bait patties with protein-packed menhaden. Without laws to limit them, the recreational shrimpers were soon catching as much shrimp as commercial trawlers -- and packing shotguns to protect their territories. According to the festival's official Web site, "As with the Old West, there was chaos building."

The state legislature threatened to outlaw shrimp baiting, but the shrimpers successfully lobbied to save what had become a beloved element of low-country culture.

"It's a lot of fun sitting and having conversation and pulling off heads," Poston admits. "It's worth it to pack your freezer all the way through the year."