For many years during the 1980s several avid bass fishermen from Albuquerque, New Mexico would caravan down to Lake Obregon Mexico for our annual February fishing trip.  My wife and I drove our Minnie Winnie Winnebago Class C motorhome and towed our Tracker bass boat, which was pretty easy due to the lightweight of aluminum Tracker boats.  All of us drove motorhomes of some kind and we all towed our bass boats behind them as well.

The fishing back then in Mexico was fantastic!  It wasn’t uncommon for my wife and I to catch over 150 bass in a day.  We would always practice “big fish” catch and release but we usually kept a few for the freezer every day.

We took the same route to and from the lake thru Guaymas (pronounced Y-Mass), which is a city on the coast of the sea of Cortez. 

This particular year there was a big problem at the port of Guaymas.  It seemed that the processing plant where the shrimp fishermen took their catch was not able to process the shrimp that had been brought to port, so about a dozen shrimp boats were just tied up to the dock loaded with iced down shrimp.  After some inquiring, we discovered that the fishermen were selling the shrimp for $4 US dollars per kilo!

 Now it doesn’t take a math wizard to figure out that $4 per kilo works out to less than $2 per pound because there are 2.2 pounds to a kilo.  And these shrimp were known as “Grande” in Mexico because there were only 6 to 8 of them per pound.  Those were giant shrimp!

All four couples in our motorhome caravan came up with the same idea.  We went into town and bought every Styrofoam cooler that the store had in stock, 36 in all.  Then we bought shrimp like crazy and stacked them in the coolers with layers of ice.  2 inches of shrimp, 2 inches of ice, 2 inches of shrimp, 2 inches of ice, all the way to the top of all 36 coolers.

We laughed ourselves silly as we caravanned our motorhomes back up to Albuquerque with 9 coolers full of shrimp sitting on the floor of each one. 

When we arrived home I called my daughter and son-in-law and told them to come down to the valley where we lived and be prepared to bag shrimp for the freezer.

Our hands turned blue from digging iced down shrimp out of those coolers and packing them in freezer bags.  We had enough shrimp to eat shrimp twice a month for 2 years.  All of our friends were both happy and jealous as we shared many delicious shrimp meals with them.  They really like the New Mexico Shrimp and Rice recipe we found on your website.