Gravy

In “A Shrimp Boat Blessing with no Shrimp Boats,” Gravy producer Irina Zhorov takes listeners to Bayou La Batre, on Alabama's Gulf Coast. Long known as the seafood capital of Alabama, Bayou La Batre has hosted a Blessing of the Fleet – a festival to bless local commercial shrimp and fishing boats – since the 1940s.  Fishing has long been a dangerous and capricious industry, where luck – in harvests, weather, accidents – has almost as much to do with a captain's success as his skill. The annual blessing, an old European tradition established in Bayou La Batre by a Catholic family of transplants from Louisiana, was a bulwark to ever-present risks. Shrimp boat captains would decorate their boats with festive flags and parade along the bayou, receiving a blessing from the Archbishop of Mobile, a little courage to go back out to sea.  But as the industry changed and evolved, what the Blessing could do seemed less obvious. Boats were built bigger and with refrigeration, so people could stay at sea longer and bring