‘Barnacle’ Bill Louwjma navigates toward his first set of traps for the day on his stone crabbing boat, ‘The Whatever’, off the coast of Everglades City, Florida in the Gulf of Mexico. With a population of only 479 in the 2000 census, ‘Everglades’ still remains a bustling little town with two main industries of fishing and tourism with a strong sense of local pride and community. During the 1970s and 1980s much of the town’s residents became involved in an elaborate drug smuggling operation, and by some counts as many as 80 percent of the adult male population has spent time in prison.

Photo & Caption by David Walter Banks

Hoh River mouth (by Sam Beebe)