Perhaps care for is a bit short of the mark. Lovers of Gulf shrimp say the taste is unique. They don't merely care for them-they crave their shrimp. Shrimp lovers eat them when they can, long for them when they can't, and pray for their frequent appearance.

"Absolutely delicious, this shrimp is,"" says Chitra Singh, who makes the trek from her north Naples home to San Carlos Island to fetch shrimp fresh from the boat at least twice a month each winter. "My husband is a gourmet cook," she says. "Shrimp from a store? Never. Nothing but the best for him, and this is the best."

Like anything that inspires such passion, shrimp command strong opinions. One doesn't just choose, whimsically, a favorite way to eat shrimp fresh from the Gulf of Mexico. Carefully calculated decisions must be made, preferably with the aid of savvy advisers: Pinch them between thumb and forefinger before plunging them into spiced lime juice? Pluck them from saffron-scented broth? Tease them out of a dense paella? Spear them not quite raw on sharp-tined forks? Tear them with teeth from skewers smoked in hickory or oak, then (if no one's looking) wolf them down? Or perhaps nibble them from a lover's palm?

In any case, after all that anticipatory pinching, plucking, teasing and nibbling comes the moment. It's a pleasure-filled pause Singh and other shrimp-eaters recognize by its signature sensation: the stopping of the clock. Suspended in time, they savor the billowy swells of snowy meat not just as humans but as hedonists. The flavor blooms almost sweet on the tongue, carrying the tiniest whiff of sea scent-a shadow of iodine, a hint of salt-a taste so pure and fine it's nearly ocean made flesh.

Hard to believe of flesh that comes from such an unlikely looking critter. Shrimp are 10-legged, spineless gill-breathers that rarely live more than a few years. Most mature shrimp spawn offshore, releasing their tiny babies to drift on currents and the tide. Inshore, they hide out in sea grass and mangroves until they're big enough to swim to deeper water-usually about six months. Scientists have identified more than 2,000 species of shrimp in the world, but the three sold most commonly from Southwest Florida's coast are the pink Gulf shrimp, the white shrimp and the rock shrimp. To many, even those names are mouthwatering.

Most shrimp eaters think of their palates first when they consider a shrimp's spot in the universe. But their communion with the Gulf of Mexico nourishes more than epicures; it also supports a Florida industry that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with cattle ranching and citrus farming as a vocation anchored by a rich past but facing an uncertain future.

As a way of life, shrimping is frequently tedious and often dangerous, but those who live it usually can't imagine doing anything else. "There's a reason they write all those odes to the sea," says shrimper Dennis "Deuce" Frehley, as he leans against an aging piling. Behind him, boats are tied as scenically as any Sunday painter could hope for. In a saggy brown T-shirt ("doesn't show as much blood") and neatly cuffed James Dean-style jeans, Frehley is a striking mixture of down-at-the-heels and dandy. Taking hollow-cheeked drags from a Camel between sentences, he says, "It's like a woman. It gets to you and once it's got a hold of you, that's a piece of your soul that's not yours anymore."

Standing next to Frehley with his arms crossed, fellow shrimper Charlie Smith spits, then laughs at his buddy's poetics. "Or maybe it's that you can't keep a job on the hill [shrimper slang for dry land] for more than a week, but out there, you have a one-month guarantee."

Smith's referring to the 21 days or more that most boats stay out before returning to empty their holds. Tiny San Carlos Island, sandwiched almost invisibly between a massive tourist destination (Fort Myers Beach) and a rapidly growing residential world (Estero Island and points east) is home to Southwest Florida''s shrimp fleet.

This the region's epicenter of shrimping, a scant half-mile of waterfront. Workers arrive from east and west-boats coming in from the water and trucks sliding in from the road. Their work brings the region millions of dollars annually, although profits vary widely because shrimp harvests are unpredictable from year to year, says Dennis Henderson, co-owner of the island's Trico Shrimp Company. All told, the industry's annual economic impact on Lee County ranges from $40 million to $100 million or more, making the island home to one of the top three shrimp harbors in the eastern Gulf, according to a comprehensive study of the island's shrimping industry by the University of Florida's Chuck Adams.

That industry is still sizable, with about 150 boats based here and 300 to 350 arriving in some months from anywhere from Tampa to Texas. (From July to November most shrimpers fish off the Lone Star state for brown shrimp, but in winter they haul fat pink shrimp out of the Gulf.)

Some days San Carlos Island bustles with so much activity that one wonders how shrimpers can avoid getting rich. The uncompromising cravings of an ever-growing army of shrimp lovers seem to demand more business. The leather-tough shrimpers themselves, probably the last equivalent of 19th-century cowboys riding the range north from Texas, seem ready and willing, often passing skills from fathers to sons and occasionally daughters.

Like Frehley. Born in Lubbock, Texas, he spends as much time as he can off land, he says, though he gets his mail in Fort Myers Beach. He doesn't have a boat or a mortgage, he's quick to point out. Instead, he works up and down the Gulf coast for any captains who need crew. There is little ceremony in Frehley's work.

A typical shrimp boat stretches 70 feet and comes equipped with booms that extend like oddly shaped wings port and starboard. From these booms, shrimpers lower 40-foot weighted nets that can rake in 300 pounds in a nightly sweep of some 40 miles. Dumped twitching and flipping into shiny, squirming heaps on sea-washed decks, the shrimp lie by the thousands mounded together with their ocean-bottom neighbors: snapper, squid, crabs and who-knows what else.

Thus begins the onboard labor, conducted sometimes in roughly rolling, windswept conditions. The boat crew converges on the shuddering pile of life like farmers equipped with mutant garden tools. Surrounding the harvest, they use their tools to comb through the sea life, scraping the shrimp from the rest of the wriggling mass, which gets pitched back into the water.

Immediately the crew begins a task most dislike: decapitation. They flick the heads off much the way porch-sitting women snap pole beans (it's a skill difficult to do well and quickly, and much prized by captains). The shrimp then get tossed on ice or bagged and secured in deep refrigeration, where they'll stay until the boat seeks harbor.

As soon as the shrimpers tie up at the dock, workers from sea and shore scramble like a hyper carnival crew. They unload 40-pound onion bags full of shrimp from the freezer boats, then empty each bag onto machines with rollers that sort by size. The smallest grade requires 51 to 60 to make up a single pound (salad shrimp, they call them); the largest number only 10 to 12 per pound.

When an ice boat docks, workers vacuum the holds, shooting the catch into big tubs of water to remove the ice. Once graded, the catch is packed into cardboard boxes and deposited in so-called blasters-big, powerful freezers. From there, its final destination might be anywhere in the country, Villers says: "Chicago, New York, any of the high-end grocery stores where quality is important."

As much as it tears, calluses and hardens the bodies and perhaps the minds of those who do it-shrimping also serves as a kind of mortar, binding individuals and families to the life and to each other. Shrimpers are a close-knit bunch, says one of their number, a grizzled Louisiana native who calls himself Skeeter and admits only reluctantly that his name is Percy Flowers. "We stick with each other good," he says. "And we pretty much all know each other. If there's a problem, we're gonna be there. It's like the Marines."

But for all that, many say that the region's days as a shrimp capital are numbered. The money's just not good enough anymore. So strapped are some shrimpers that in recent years, government representatives have started making the docks a regular stop, offering shrimpers information on applying for low-cost health care, job retraining and food stamps. Like a lymphatic disease, the suffering has spread beyond the region to the entire Gulf coast-so much so that last year, shrimpers united in the Southern Shrimp Alliance to file an anti-dumping suit with the U.S. Commerce Department against 16 shrimp-producing nations that American fishermen claim are selling their product for less than it costs to harvest.

Perhaps some of the problem is marketing, an art shrimpers here admit they have never mastered. Why would anyone buy farm-raised shrimp when they could have the natural harvest? Maybe because they don't understand the difference, suggests Christine Gala, another of Trico's co-owners. "There's just no comparison in terms of taste and quality to wild-caught shrimp," she says. "We catch our shrimp in clean, deep water. We use no chemicals, no preservatives. All we do is freeze them. The stuff raised in ponds, they have to give them hormones and antibiotics to even keep them alive." Her hope is that when the public realizes the difference, it will demand fresh Gulf shrimp.

Shrimping in Southwest Florida faces another challenge: growth. As the value of waterfront land skyrockets, the temptation to sell long-time family waterfront rises. Bob Rosenberg, who publishes the industry magazine Shrimp News, predicts that eventually, those who fish for shrimp will lose out to those who farm them.

The idea makes Gala seethe, although that's not to say that she hasn't had her doubts about shrimping. The daughter and granddaughter of shrimpers, Gala tried once to escape the industry's pull. "I swore I'd never marry a shrimper," she admits. And she didn't, strictly speaking. But after she married, her husband bought a shrimp boat. "And that was it," she says.

It's a life made increasingly tough by commercially farmed shrimp mostly arriving mostly from Asian equatorial countries and selling at prices well below cost for wild-caught native shrimp, according to Gala. These cheap imports have dragged domestic shrimp prices down, along with the locals who try to compete. "Prices today are the same as what they were 10 years ago," she says.

"Ten years? Try 30 years ago," says Joe Villers, who owns Villers Seafood with his father. "You have to go back to the '70s to find prices lower than what we have today. Labor over there is so much lower and they can raise them in ditches."

What Villers, Gala and other Gulf shrimpers who are in it for the long haul can compete with is taste. Their understandable bias toward wild-caught shrimp is shared by many critics and restaurateurs. In an article in the August issue of the Wine Spectator, food writer Sam Gugino likens the two tastes, wild and farmed, to young and aged wines. In addition to the flavor imparted to the meat by the sea's natural salinity, he writes, "Ocean shrimp also grow more slowly, which, like grapes with long hang time, adds to their flavor."

That flavor makes pilgrims and inspires converts. To Chitra Singh, standing next to her pearly Lexus on the working-class shoreline of San Carlos Island, flavor merits escaping her Naples shopping orbit to become-every three weeks or so-an expeditionary epicure.

There are hundreds like her, and if shrimpers had slicker marketers, most likely there would be thousands. "Coming here is like a tiny holiday," she says, emphasizing the first syllable and the word's original meaning: a tiny holy day.

Recipe

STEAMED SHRIMP

Though old-time shrimp recipes often call for long cooking times (in Cross Creek Cookery, originally published in 1942, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings prescribes 20 minutes in briskly boiling water), many cooks now eschew boiling completely.

Sanibel restaurateur and seafood expert Matt Asen recommends simply steaming shrimp for seven minutes, then plunging them into ice water. The result: Crisp, sweet shrimp that "taste like shrimp are supposed to taste."

Christine Gala's Skewered Shrimp

1 pound jumbo shrimp

1 pound bacon

Peeled onions, cut in thick chunks

Baby vegetables or cubed vegetables such as sweet bell peppers, cherry tomatoes and zucchini

Salt and pepper to taste

Wrap each shrimp in a strip of bacon and thread on skewers along with onions and vegetables. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, then grill or broil until the shrimp is cooked through and the vegetables are tender-crisp.

Chitra Singh's Curried Shrimp

2 tomatoes, chopped fine

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon garam masala or curry powder

1 teaspoon cumin

1/2 teaspoon coriander

1 1-inch cube fresh ginger, grated

1 or 2 fresh hot chilies, minced

Juice of 1 lemon

1 can unsweetened coconut milk

2 or 3 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed

1 1/2 pounds fresh shrimp, peeled and cleaned

About 4 tablespoons vegetable oil

Hot cooked basmati rice

Shelled pistachios, if desired

Combine everything but the shrimp, oil and garlic in a saucepan and set aside. Over medium heat in a wide skillet,

heat the oil and sauté the garlic until it is golden. Add the shrimp and cook until the meat is evenly white. Heat the ingredients in the saucepan until they simmer, and with a slotted spoon, add the shrimp and any garlic that clings to them. Simmer everything a few minutes more, until flavors blend and shrimp is cooked through. Taste for seasonings and adjust, if necessary. Serve over rice and sprinkle with the pistachios.

Lillian Hovell's Steamed Rock Shrimp

Under their tough (but entirely peelable) shells, rock shrimp hide a sweet, tender interior. Fort Myers Beach resident and shrimp boat owner Mark Townley considers them to be some of the finest eating the Gulf has to offer. This recipe was handed out more than a decade ago at the blessing of the fleet and shrimp festival, which takes place on varying dates every spring, depending on the moon. (Shrimp hide when it's bright, making full moons a good time for shrimpers to stay in port and party.)

1 12-ounce bottle of beer

1 1/2 tablespoons Old Bay seasoning

3 cloves garlic, crushed

1 clove garlic, minced

3 tablespoons dried juniper berries

2 pounds rock shrimp, heads removed, shells on

Juice of 1 lime

1 stick of butter

In the bottom of a steamer, combine the beer, Old Bay, three cloves garlic and juniper berries and bring to a boil. Place the shrimp in the top portion of the steamer, cover and steam until the shrimp are firm and cooked through, about seven minutes, stirring once or twice to ensure even cooking.

Remove the shrimp and place under cold running water, then pat dry.

Melt the butter, add the lime juice and minced garlic, and serve as a dipping sauce.