The catch, about a ton of it, splats onto the deck of the shrimper Miss Bertha. Thousands of softball-sized globes glisten in the sun, then slide down a tray into the boat’s belly.
Welcome to Georgia’s third-largest commercial fishery by weight: cannonball jellyfish.
The stingless jellies are keeping shrimpers who once shunned them financially afloat.
Howell Boone, 53, is one of them. He bought his boat specifically for jellyballing after Georgia’s shrimp fishery got squeezed by high fuel prices and cheap imported shrimp. The Darien resident now hauls in as many jellyfish as the only processor can handle — 60,000 pounds at a time.
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