With his boats now trawling for oil instead of shrimp, Dave Chauvin is worried he may have to move away from the Louisiana town named after his great-great-grandfather.
BP may finally have succeeded in capping its ruptured offshore well after nearly three months, but not before an estimated two to four million barrels of oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico.
Like many people here, Chauvin is afraid it could take years — or even decades — for the region's fisheries to recover from the toxic soup of oil and chemical dispersants used to keep the crude from reaching fragile coastal wetlands.
Which leaves him with a painful choice: give up shrimping and join thousands of other displaced fishermen in trying to forge a new career in coastal Louisiana or take his boats and his family to cleaner waters.
"Leaving here takes our heritage away. Our culture is here. Our family is here," his wife Kim Chauvin told AFP.
"They have a lot of nice places on the East Coast, but it's not home."
The Chauvins have been doing everything they can to keep their business and their family together.
They are managing a fleet of 25 shrimp boats — including three of their own — hired to skim for oil under BP's Vessels of Opportunity program.
Trucks that used to transport shrimp are now carrying supplies for the men working two-week stints miles (kilometers) offshore where the oil stretches for as far as the eye can see and is sometimes a foot (30 centimeters) deep.
Their two sons have spent much of the past three months out there, skimming by day and dumping the oil by night at a "mother ship" while smaller crew boats makes the eight hour supply runs back to port.
The hardest part of the job is trying to work in the plastic suits when temperatures are already in the 90s Fahrenheit (30s Celsius) and the Chauvins are worried their sons may end up getting sick from breathing in all the oil fumes.
But they're lucky to have the work: just 2,754 boats across the region have been hired under the vessels of opportunity program which pays 1,200 to 3,000 dollars a day for the boat and 200 dollars a day to each crew member.
That might sound like a lot of money, but it doesn't come close to what they used to pull in when the shrimp were running and their seafood packing plant was humming.
Nor does it cover their fixed costs, like the mortgage, the insurance, and the tens of thousands of dollars they spend on electricity for the freezers full of last season's catch.
The Chauvins built the plant as a way to bring in extra money after shrimp prices collapsed in 2001 because of an influx of imports.
Every year they reinvested their profits to expand the business and had planned to start hand-peeling shrimp this summer in a processing plant they'd built between the dock and their modest bayou-side home.
They kept the business going, and growing, even after the region was ravaged by four massive hurricanes: Katrina and Rita in 2005 and Gustav and Ike in 2008.
"Everything you see was built by my hands," Chauvin said as he walked through the idled plant.
"Every yard of cement you see here was laid by us. We started from scratch."
The skimming work is keeping the Chauvins afloat, but it likely won't last for more than a few months now that the well's been capped.
And they haven't seen a penny of compensation yet for the money they've lost from having to idle their processing plant.
Kim and their youngest son are thinking about going to college. Their eldest son is trying to get work on an oil rig.
Chauvin's got a line on a shrimping permit out in North Carolina, but he's not sure yet if he's going to buy it. It certainly won't be enough to keep the family together.
"I've got three boats and two sons," he said. "It's one permit."
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