The Vanishing Tides of Aransas Bay: Where Did the Shrimp Boats Go?

In the 1980s, hundreds of shrimp boats left Fulton Harbor before sunrise every morning. Today, fewer than 350 licensed shrimping vessels work the entire Texas Gulf Coast — down from over 3,000. This episode traces what happened: the golden era of Rockport-Fulton's working waterfront, the arrival of Vietnamese refugee fishing families after the fall of Saigon, the global seafood market that made wild-catch shrimping economically impossible for everyone, and the ecological cost nobody put on the ledger — the tarpon, the sawfish, the fish kills, the duck skies that old-timers still describe and nobody sees anymore. This is not a story about who was right. It's a story about what a bay looks like when the boats stop coming back.

Available August 10, 2026