The Atlantic menhaden industry was booming. By 1949, National Geographic and Life magazine were saluting it with headlines ballyhooing "Uncle Sam's Top Commercial Fish" and "Biggest Ocean Harvest." The catch soared year after year, reaching a peak of 1.6 billion pounds in 1956. But not even the fish's phenomenal fecundity could sustain them under this industrial onslaught. Menhaden usually spawn far out at sea, and spotters were finding schools as far out as 50 miles, some with so many egg-filled females that the nets would come up slimy with roe. Then, inevitably, the catch began to fall. By 1969, it had plummeted almost 80 percent. Looking back ruefully on the role he and other spotter pilots had played in the demise of the species, Watters (who died in 2004 at age 79) told me, "We are what destroyed the fishery, because the menhaden had no place to hide."
The collapse of the Atlantic menhaden industry allowed one company to gain almost exclusive control of the endangered fishery. In 1953, during the heyday of the Atlantic menhaden industry, George H.W. Bush cofounded Zapata Corporation, a wildcatting oil and gas exploration company headquartered in Houston. After Bush sold his stake in Zapata in 1966, the company began to branch out into fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, "wringing oil out of fish," as one business journal snidely put it. In the early 1990s, Malcolm Glazer took control of Zapata, installed his son Avram as president and CEO, sold off the company's oil and gas interests, purchased the Bucs (pushing local leaders and voters to impose a sales tax to build Raymond James Stadium), and turned Zapata into a mere shell for a subsidiary with a jazzy new name more fit for a health-food company — Omega Protein.
The Glazers, who made their original fortune in real estate, started snapping up the competition like so many menhaden. Most of the eastern seaboard companies, including some founded in the 19th century, were going bankrupt or frantically merging with each other. In 1997, Zapata took over the remaining Atlantic and Gulf competitors, leaving only one small independent in each region. In 1998, Zapata spun off Omega Protein as a separate corporation, although it still owns 58 percent of the company, which is worth a mere $145 million and is Zapata's only remaining business. In May of that year, the Wall Street Journal noted Zapata's futile attempts to become a dot-com powerhouse while sneering at the Glazer family's "fish-oil empire."
Although Glazer's household-name status in Tampa Bay has not exactly spread to the country at large, he has managed to become arguably Britain's most hated man, reviled almost daily in the British press since last May, when he bought a national icon — the Manchester United soccer team — and turned it into his "corporate toy." To finance this coup, Glazer assumed a mountain of debt. Last December, Zapata announced that it is trying to sell off Omega Protein, possibly to help service this debt or perhaps to unload the business before its troubles become too obvious. No sale has emerged. In the meantime, however, Omega has taken financial losses, last month announcing an $11 million operating deficit in 2005. The reason: Hurricanes Katrina and Rita wiped out three of its four fish processing facilities and a shipyard, causing $27.7 million in damages. The company's financial statement said the two processing plants — in Abbeville, La., and Moss Point, Miss. — are expected to be repaired in time for the 2006 fishing season.
Omega now owns 61 ships and 32 spotter planes. Most operate in the Gulf of Mexico, off Louisiana and Mississippi, although none work the Florida waters because the Sunshine State doesn't allow purse seine netting of menhaden. Only 10 of the ships and seven of the planes — all based at the company's factory complex in Reedville, Va. — still operate on the Atlantic coast. And there Omega has big problems.
As Atlantic menhaden have declined, their range has contracted. The biggest, most oil-rich fish used to concentrate off New England in the summer. But from 1993 until 2004, no significant schools of adult menhaden were observed north of Cape Cod. As awareness grew of menhaden's importance to the dwindling stocks of Atlantic food and game fish, state after state banned the fishery from its waters. Today the only Atlantic states that still allow it are North Carolina and Virginia. Unable to fish in the waters of any other states and no longer able to find large oceanic schools in federal waters, which begin three miles out from the states' coasts, Omega Protein now gets close to 70 percent of its Atlantic catch from the Virginia waters of the Chesapeake Bay. The industry has been forced "into a box," Omega spokesman Toby Gascon told the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) last July. "We have nowhere else to go."
