The sky is gray over the Dutch island of Texel, and there is a strong breeze on the Wadden Sea. The island’s cyclists don’t have to do any pedaling if they go downwind. The wind is so strong that even the sheep are hiding in the lee of the dikes to get away from it.
When I get to Oudeschild, a picturesque village on this largest of the Wadden Islands, it’s blowing Force 6, and wind is tearing the whitecaps right off the tops of the waves. Tucked away inside Oudeschild’s well-protected harbor, I find the TX20 Walrus, a shrimper licensed to carry passengers, and ask the skipper whether he’ll be going out this morning.
I had found out about the shrimper on its website, which states, “The windier the day, the greater the adventure.” With the sea conditions being what they are, I’m hoping to see for myself if Walrus is the home of “Deadliest Catch, Texel style,” as the website promises.
The captain tells me he won’t be going out this morning. “This afternoon,” he growls. I’m bummed because the forecast predicts the winds will start letting up by then, and I want it to be a wild ride. “I came all the way from America,” I tell him, but the only response I get is a curt “two o’clock” as he disappears into the wheelhouse.
Now, I have almost four hours to kill, although I know that won’t be a problem on Texel. The island is drool-worthy beautiful with long views across flat meadows as well as the Wadden and North seas. In the village, I get myself a broodje kaas and a kopje koffie (a cheese sandwich and a small cup of potent coffee), which are daily staples of the Dutch diet. Fortified, I drive around the coastline in a counterclockwise direction. Texel is still heavily agrarian. There are sheep everywhere. Texel sheep look like all other sheep, until you notice their muscular build and their beefy faces. A tough native breed, the sturdier ones look more like Rottweilers than woolly backs. In 2020, a 6-month-old Texel sheep sold in Scotland for nearly a half-million dollars, setting a world record.
On my way north, I stop at a roadside memorial to the Allied pilots who crashed their Lancaster bomber on the island during World War II. In May 1945, Texel was the site of one of the war’s last European battles. Down the road, I inspect an old windmill that pumped water out of the polders, admire long rows of red poppies, visit the lighthouse, walk on an enormous beach, and check out the dune system, a Dutch national park.
Once back in Oudeschild, I board Walrus. Built of steel in 1985, the 101-foot-long kotter has twin Volvo Penta diesel engines, a pilothouse aft, two forward outriggers to deploy and retrieve her nets, a midship processing station that separates the catch from the bycatch, and a boiling station to cook the shrimp. At one time, there were hundreds of Dutch kotters operating on the Wadden Sea, and Oudeschild’s harbor was filled with them. Today, the Dutch shrimping fleet is down to 83 boats, and the fleet continues to shrink.
Early in 2023, the government ordered four of the seven remaining kotters in Oudeschild to be dismantled, although the TX20 is not counted among them because she operates as a demonstration vessel that only catches a small amount of shrimp for educational purposes. The TX20 has a remarkably low draft of just 2 feet, which allows her to navigate over the Wadden Sea’s many large shoals and shallow waters.
The Wadden Sea is an intertidal zone between the low-lying Frisian Islands that separate northern Holland, northwestern Germany and western Denmark from the North Sea. It is full of tidal mudflats and wetlands that provide a critical breeding ground for marine life and migrating birds.
At high tide, the shoals hide below the surface. They make navigation tricky, forcing ships to stay in the channels that are carved out by storms and the strong tidal flows that constantly shift the mud and sand. The tides average about 6 feet, but when storms blow hard out of the west and the North Sea’s waters get pushed between the islands, the Wadden Sea may rise as much as an additional 16 feet. When those winds don’t let up, they can trap the floodwaters for days on end and turn murderous. In the Middle Ages and into the early 18th century, four catastrophic floods killed thousands of people. It is a major reason why the Dutch fortified their land with dikes and causeways.
In Dutch, wad means mudflat. When the tide goes out and areas of the bottom become exposed, people have been known to walk from the mainland to some of the nearer Wadden Islands. Wadlopen (walking on the Wadden Sea’s muddy bottom) is a popular recreational pastime that should only be done in the company of experienced walkers or professional guides. If you get lost amid the mudflats or take too much time, the tide will rush in at great speed, catch you and likely drown you.
The intertidal conditions make the Wadden Sea a rich source of seafood that has long fed the Dutch population. There are crabs, flounder, sole and others, but the TX20 was designed to catch garnalen—shrimp.
There are 300 known types of edible shrimp. The Dutch shrimpers are after the tiny, sweet one known in Latin as Crangon crangon. It has many names in English—common shrimp, bay shrimp, sand shrimp and brown shrimp—but the French call it la crevette grise. The Dutch and Belgians call it de grijze garnaal, and the Brits also call it the gray shrimp.
Crangon crangon uses the tidal flats in the Wadden Sea as a nursery, where they grow rapidly, reaching an inch in their first month. Adults are typically between 1.2 and 2 inches long, live about three years and spend most of their time on or near the seafloor.
The shrimp are generally abundant and an important part of the ecosystem. It is a common food source for a wide range of species. Because they mature so fast and have a prolonged reproductive season, they can quickly recover from mass mortalities. In 1990, when the Wadden Sea was invaded by a school of juvenile whiting, the Crangon crangon population was virtually wiped out but recovered within a year.
The shrimp are harvested by the British, Belgians and Danes, but the great majority—about 80 percent—are caught by Dutch and German trawlers.
I would have preferred to hop aboard a ship with just a captain and crew, but, short on time and intrigued by the TX20’s claim of a Deadliest Catch experience, I pay to get aboard Walrus. The gruff skipper gladly accepts my 20 euros, and I take up station on the upper platform forward between the outriggers. Before casting off, he uses the levers inside the wheelhouse to lower the drying nets to the deck, which is when I see the first opportunity for a deadly experience.
The nets include steel panels called doors, which, when lowered into the water, open the net to catch the shrimp. The four blue doors on the TX20 are thick and large enough to kill an elephant, and I watch with trepidation as parents and children walk right by them as the captain lowers them to the deck.
But nobody gets hurt. With the doors and nets stowed, the captain takes Walrus out onto the Wadden Sea. The southwest wind has lost some of its morning intensity, but it’s still blowing in the 20s, and as soon as we leave the security of the harbor, Walrus begins to roll. Some startled passengers let out cries, but it’s a nice, long, lazy roll without any snap to it. We cross the deep water of the Texel-stroom channel outside the harbor, and, when we reach the shallows, the boat settles right down.
Inside the wheelhouse, the captain grabs his microphone. First in Dutch and then in German, he explains what we will be seeing on this two-hour tour. His speech is a mostly entertaining mix of facts, fiction, fantasy and some macho talk—punctuated with politically incorrect barbs.
In Dutch, he explains how the rolling was due to the deep waters of the channel we just crossed and how we’re now crossing a shoal that is only 3 feet deep. Then, he tells the Dutch passengers that the big blue metal doors he’d lowered to the deck were designed by him with assistance from NASA. He addresses the German speakers next and tells them that his German is kompleet sheisen (“total crap”), which draws a smile and a chuckle from the crowd. Then, he says the doors were designed by him and Lufthansa. It’s obvious that the captain won’t let the facts stand in the way of a good story. He then alerts his passengers to the two bathrooms on the forward deck and explains that the one to port is for boys and girls, and the one to starboard is for people who are gender neutral. I wonder if the captain knows that Crangon crangon is a protandrous hermaphrodite. Would he be upset to learn that the little shrimp he catches can change from males to females?
I join the captain, Herman Blom, in the wheelhouse and ask him how long he’s been a shrimp fisherman. “My whole life,” the born-and-raised Texelaar tells me. “Since I was a boy.” As we make our way downwind along a shoal, Blom uses the microphone to explain the shrimping process.
Each side of the TX20 has an outrigger with one net and two doors that are controlled by steel cables. The nets are raised off the deck, and the outriggers are lowered until the nets hit the water. When the cables are let out, the doors are forced apart by pressure from the water until they are about 25 feet apart. Blom tells his passengers that the net doesn’t do any damage to the sea bottom. “Unlike what some people who know nothing about fishing might claim,” he adds. The “people” Blom refers to are environmentalists who say dragging does too much damage to the sea bottom.
Blom recently started flying a large, green flag aboard his boat to counter their messaging. This protest flag says, “Stop de groene leugen over de garnalenvisserij” or, “Stop the green lies about the shrimp fishery.” The flag also says, “Stop met meespelen”—“Stop playing along”—a shot at the Dutch State Lottery, which the fishermen say steers millions of euros per year to Greenpeace and other organizations that are trying to limit shrimp fishing in the Wadden Sea. The environmental groups say the sea is a major stopover for migratory birds and that the Crangon crangon are a key part of the ecosystem’s food chain that needs to be preserved.
The Dutch shrimp fishermen say they’ve made a lot of concessions during the past 15 years. They’ve worked with the environmental groups to close certain areas to fishing, bought out a lot of shrimp fishermen, agreed to share data and set new standards with the fishermen in Germany and Denmark, and bought nets that allow immature shrimp to pass through—all of which is true.
Blom must drag his nets across the sea bottom because that’s where the shrimp hide during the day. (Crangon crangon only swim at night, when they forage for food.) To avoid becoming a meal for others, during the day, Crangon crangon bury themselves in the sea bottom, leaving only their antenna and eyes exposed. The one way to catch the shrimp is to scare them out of their sandy lair. That’s done with a klossenpees, a row of large, rubber wheels attached to the bottom forward end of the shrimping net. The wheels bounce up and down across the bottom and create a vibration that scares the shrimp out of the sand and into the net.
About 30 minutes into the trip, Blom lowers the port outrigger over the side and feeds out the cable that sends the net into the sea. The drag on the port net helps the TX20 make a hard 180-degree turn. Now headed in the opposite direction from where he came, Blom lowers the starboard net over the side. As the doors open the nets, the TX20 nearly comes to a grinding halt. Blom pushes the throttles forward. The Volvo Penta diesels rumble, and the boat slowly begins to drag along. I ask Blom about our speed. He explains that we’ve gone from about 6 knots with the nets on board to about 3 knots with them dragging the bottom—even though he’s poured on the power.
Running into the wind, Blom brings the TX20 within spitting distance of the exposed shoal to starboard, where a dozen seals are sunning themselves and seabirds roam around looking for food. Blom tells his passengers that once the nets are brought aboard, there will be bycatch, but it will be sorted from the shrimp and returned alive to the water. About 20 minutes later, Blom raises one of the nets, and the deckhand uses a boathook to pull it inboard. After untying the bottom, the deckhand releases the catch onto a stainless table. All I see is lots of seaweed, crabs and small fish. I can’t even see one shrimp, but Blom says they’re there, and he is right.
From the table, a small conveyor belt lifts the catch up and into a series of rotating trommels—drums with increasingly smaller holes that separate the bycatch from the shrimp, and that separate the marketable shrimp from the immature ones. About half of the shrimp will not be of marketable size. Almost 90 percent of those juvenile Crangon crangon will make it back to the sea alive, but before returning to the deep, they will face a major gauntlet.
A couple hundred gulls are hovering over the ship, eagerly awaiting mealtime. When the TX20 flushes her bycatch over the side, a feeding frenzy ensues. Dozens of gulls fall out of the air like dive bombers to eat any edible morsels. For the gulls, it’s a smorgasbord.
After pulling the second net and sorting its catch, Blom stops the boat next to the big shoal and joins his deckhand to cook the shrimp in a cauldron of boiling seawater. They then spread the cooked shrimp out on two long stainless bars so the passengers can peel and eat them.
I love to plow through a bowl of peel-and-eat shrimp, but the tiny Crangon crangon are much harder to peel than your average-sized restaurant shrimp. I struggle to peel one, but Blom, who has been noticeably taciturn with me for most of the ride, suddenly takes mercy on me and shows how it’s done. He grabs a shrimp’s head between his left thumb and forefinger, and its tail between his right thumb and forefinger, and then rapidly moves the tail in and out of the shrimp’s body to break the shell so he can pull out the meat.
I manage to get a shrimp out of its shell, stick it in my mouth and realize it’s nothing like any other shrimp I’ve ever had. They may be tiny and labor-intensive to catch and peel, but the Crangon crangon are light and almost sweet.
You can still buy unpeeled shrimp in the Netherlands and peel them at home yourself, but for hygienic reasons and to ensure quality, thuispellen—fishermen’s families peeling them at home for commercial market distribution—was outlawed in 1990.
Nowadays, reefer trucks are used to drive the unpeeled shrimp to Morocco, where labor is much cheaper. There, thousands of Moroccan women sit at long tables to peel the shrimp, which are then trucked back up to Northern Europe. The round-trip journey takes 11 days. To prevent bacteria, the shrimp are treated with benzoic and sorbic acid. That makes them taste salty and nothing like the tasty shrimp I’m eating on Blom’s boat.
Blom lifts the nets and heads for port. It’s been an interesting two-hour boat ride. The good news is that Texel’s weather and the TX20’s steel doors didn’t turn out to be so deadly. The bad news is that Blom, who is back on the microphone, might still kill me with his speeches.
From the wheelhouse, he tells the passengers over the speakers that they are free to pick up a bag of cooked shrimp from the deckhand. Then, he says, “Take the shrimp home, open a bottle of wine, turn on some romantic music, sit down with your woman and peel away.”
This article was originally published in the October 2023 issue.
