By Drew Hawkins
NPR
PORT SULPHUR, La. — When Acy Cooper finished building a new 31-foot trawler, he had a problem: his wife had just given birth to their daughter. And it's tradition to name boats after a woman.
"So how do you do that and cover both of 'em?" he asked.
Cooper found a simple solution. He took his newborn daughter's first name and his wife's middle name and christened the vessel the Lacy Kay. That was in 1983.
For the next 40-plus years, the Lacy Kay was the main ship in Cooper's three-boat fleet, hauling in thousands and thousands of pounds of shrimp from the Gulf. But not this year.