"We used to harvest the brine-shrimp eggs from the shore with rakes and shovels," Gail Sanders recalls, shaking his head at the thought.
"We sat at the kitchen table and spooned them into Dixie cups and then stored them in the freezer."A lanky, soft-spoken man, Sanders smiles and adds, "That was just a few years ago."
Now, his nephew Kevin scouts the Great Salt Lake from a chartered airplane, searching for the rich, russet streaks of eggs. Crews below skim them off the water with 40-foot, $50,000 harvesters designed by his son Bruce. A state-of-the-art processing plant in Riverdale cleans and packs the eggs for shipment to international markets.
The brine-shrimp-egg business has come a long way since Sanders' father, Cleon, began gathering the strange, minute creatures for tropical fish food 40 years ago. And Gail Sanders has come a long way with it.
A Utah State University graduate in chemistry and physics, Sanders taught chemistry for five years at Bonneville High School in Washington Terrace while working summers in his father's struggling enterprise. In 1966, he decided to join the business full time.
"I've never regretted making that change," Sanders said. He enjoys working with other family members in a business that keeps him close to the desolate beauty of the Great Salt Lake.
He's no salty dog, but there is something of the seafarer in his attitude toward the changeable waters and capricious elements that govern his life. Fluctuations in salinity with the rise and fall of the lake level determine where the harvesters work. Wind can scatter the eggs and make the job impossible. Bitter cold can make it miserable.
"We're at the mercy of the lake," he said philosophically.
With the growth in the brine-shrimp industry has come political interest, new regulations, permits, complicated state land leases, access controversies, patent disputes. "I'd rather deal with storms than all of that," he says.
Not that he's a stranger to politics. He has served as a City Council member and two terms as mayor of Riverdale.
At age 63, he no longer spends his days harvesting the lake and hefting 75-pound bags of the sand-like eggs, but he's no stranger to those who do. He frequently visits his crews at campsites along the remote northern shoreline and takes a personal interest in each of his employees.
"They're all decent, hard-working men," he said of his employees, bristling at news reports that he believes have made the public view all brine shrimpers as "rabble-rousers."
The troubles some brine-shrimp companies have had, including the slaying of a worker in October, should not reflect on the entire industry, Sanders said.
He concedes that tensions have increased with the number of brine-shrimping operations on the lake - 13 companies where once there was one. "We never had any problems when all we saw out there was coyote and fox," he said.
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(ADDITIONAL INFORMATION)
The brine-shrimp industry
- Thirteen companies are shrimping the Great Salt Lake, employing about 200 people.
- Permits from the Division of Wildlife Resources cost $3,000 per year.
- Brine-shrimp eggs are skimmed off the water with special harvesting boats.
- The eggs are cleaned, vacuum packed into cans and shipped to Southeast Asian prawn farms.
- They are hatched, and the hatchlings-called nauplii - are fed to prawn larvae for two or three weeks.
- Eggs - seven million to the ounce - sell for $5.50 to $8.00 per pound.