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Crawfish season off to a slow, expensive start

6 years 1 month 3 weeks ago Thursday, February 01 2018 Feb 1, 2018 February 01, 2018 6:39 PM February 01, 2018 in News
Source: WBRZ

BATON ROUGE - The Louisiana crawfish season is kicking off slowly, leaving many customers with a high price and low supply.

Largely thanks to the weather, the tasty seafood is not as readily available as it was at this same time last year.

“People have gotten spoiled to having them in January and December,” said Perry Sagely, a local crawfish distributor. “Now we actually had a cold winter and we haven’t had much water, so the crawfish are limited to what we can get.”

The crawfish that are available right now come at a high price, costing nearly $5 per pound for live crawfish, and they can only be found at certain locations.

“At many places, they're not going to sell live ones because there's not enough to boil. People call in and walk in. But with the price right now, people are slowly eating it and it's picking up," said James Le, the owner of Country Corner.

Le's store, Country Corner, only had three small sacks delivered, which he said isn't typical.

“We got a sack that's 22 and 25 pounds, so that's a little under average. Usually, about 33 pounds is the average weight. When [the] season kicks in, we get sacks up to 40 pounds,” he said.

Many people in the area are mainly concerned with when they can buy live crawfish by the sack. According to Sagely, that depends on the weather.

"If we start getting some sunshine, some 70 and 75-degree days to get that water to warm up, I think it's going to be really good and the price will start dropping.”

Although quantities may be limited, crawfish are available at the following locations:

NOLA Cajun Seafood

Tony’s Seafood

Rouses Market

Pit-N-Peel

Capital City Crawfish

Country Corner

Sportsman Seafood and Deli

Head's & Tail's Seafood 

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