| TRAVELS OF DURSMIRG VOLUME IV THE ROGUES OF ST. AUGUSTINE AND OTHER SOCIAL MISFITS Chapter 22 |
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ST. AUGUSTINE’S OFFSHORE AND INSHORE FISHERMEN
The snapper fishermen and their strange existence;
Forty miles from town doesn’t really seem like so far away after all that is only as far away as Jacksonville…a short
ride in a car.
Well forty miles from town is a long, long way when it is due east straight out to sea in the Atlantic Ocean especially
when the only thing between you and an infinitely endless sea is a flimsy, rickety, little old leaking worm eaten scow
with an engine well into its ninth life.
The mentality and motivation that drives a man to live on the edge of a very precarious existence cannot be
summed up in a few words.
These special men march to a different drummer fully aware of their perilous position perched on the edge of
eternity. They face the grim reaper every moment they are at sea.
Being out there in that realm of total self-reliance and being honestly faced with this reality then opens a new door to
another world few men will ever have the opportunity or balls to venture into.
These are the “salt water cowboys”.
They are not boisterous, brazen or brash.
They are solemn men, thinking men that take the time to live out there somewhere between earth and the cosmos.
Holding dear their reverent convictions based upon ponderous thoughts they quietly keep their world out to sea
locked up in their special private treasure chest.
Going out into their salty abyss, a week at a time riding at anchor hanging on to life by a thin thread in a ragged little
old worn out vessel that had passed its prime of life decades before these salt water cowboys return again and
again and press the outer limits to the proverbial limits.
Gordon Whitmore and others went out nearly 40 miles off the North Florida Coast at the edge of the Gulf Stream
and far away from any land and well out of the shipping lanes. This was a lonely isolated place, somewhere between
heaven and hell where the fickle finger of fate in the blink of an eye could send Mother Nature’s ranting rage to
terrorize and terrify.
These were the true “salt water cowboys” that lived by the seat of their pants. They were the last of the breed whose
wild independence drove these fearless free spirited men to the outer limits of the wild remoteness out upon the
open sea.
They lived every perilous moment out upon the very edge of disaster where they alone would fight the fight for their
life with a special survival instinct of marathon endurance for their continued existence.
There was one last long shot when push came to shove and a trip to the bottom appeared eminent…a call to the
Coast Guard got them off the hook and spared these salt water cowboys for yet another trip out to the edge the
abyss.
This life on the outer edge is not for everybody, it cannot be explained…it must be lived.
Dewitt Cowart was an old time southern gentleman with Deep South ancestry dating back in untraceable time to
the early days of St. Augustine’s founding.
Having learned how to live out of the river Dewitt fed his family being a commercial crab fisherman who worked for
himself and by himself living over on Sanford Street next to our friends Big Bob Baker and Beverly.
This part of St. Augustine had been in its day a very nice neighborhood, not stately but solid and was in the process
of slipping into a marginal status when Bob and Beverly Baker started turning it around with their artful upgrades
and elegant renovations.
Jane and I got to know easy going and friendly Dewitt when our friends Bob and Beverly Baker bought their four-plex
apartment house next door.
Dewitt’s classic old vintage home was an interesting Victorian style house that in its bygone day was elegant with
fancy handsomely stylish beveled glass windows and excessive gingerbread bric-a-brac wood adornments that were
gradually slipping into a state of irreversible neglect.
Dewitt was getting old and losing his drive to advancing years and his lovely old house was going down with him.
Old Dewitt made and repaired all his own crab traps by hand, which he had been doing all his life and worked them
in St. Augustine’s waterways without any help, which gave him a meager hard earned income.
Dewitt’s roots went way back on the St. Augustine waterfront and he knew all of the old time commercial fisherman,
their histories and loved to recollect interesting stories about all those salty rogues and seafaring social misfits.
We had many mutual friends in the area fishing industry including our old friends George Tappin and Dick Janson
who were both salty and seafaring fisherman that gained the knowledge of their trade by working up through the
ranks as was the way of the day.
In Dewitt’s lifetime the St. Augustine commercial fishing industry was born and he was there, a part of it, to see it all
happen, now he was a part of a vanishing breed and an industry that was sinking away from him.
I used to buy my crab traps from Dewitt and he always treated me right on the price. Dewitt would tell me that I was
the only one in town and in fact in his whole lifetime that had actually paid him for a crab trap. I know he deeply
appreciated my integrity because he would go on to tell how many traps that had been stolen and how many he
would find pilfered and plundered.
I can still recall Dewitt saying in disgust that the pilferers not only stole his catch and livelihood but that they wouldn’t
even have the decency to at least close the traps after stealing the contents.
Dewitt’s crab fishing was very backbreaking and labor intensive. He got low pay and it was seasonal so it is hard for
me to imagine that any person would stoop to stealing from such a poor honest and hard working man as he…but
Dewitt suffered his losses and resolutely carried on.
Things might have been different when Dewitt was a young man and the rivers and bays abounded with seafood,
but now Dewitt was old, the river only marginally productive and the overhead too high to contemplate new
beginnings.
Dewitt’s beautiful daughter married one of the wealthiest people in town a man named Gregg Baker from the
Thompson, Bailey Baker Insurance Co.
Though Dewitt fished the inland rivers and bays he didn’t qualify as a river rat…he was commercially engaged in the
seafood industry.
Lloyd Wainwright and his chronically allergic to everything wife Caroline lived in west St. Augustine at 8 Eastman
Street in a modest little middle class unpretentious house in an unassuming neighborhood leading a quiet and very
unpretentious life.
Jane and I had already made several shrimp boat deliveries around the state of Florida with Captain Wainwright
when he signed the guest book aboard our boat Dursmirg October 17, 1975 and he wrote; “To two of the nicest
people I know.”
Gray and mostly balding old Captain Lloyd had been a shrimp boat owner and a substantial part of the interesting,
intriguing and very colorful St. Augustine fishing fleet history all of his life.
Old Captain Lloyd had no formal education in seamanship or navigation and learned all his boat handling skills by
trial and error as most of his local fellow fishing associates had done and then boated by the seat of their pants.
Mature and methodical matter-of-fact old Captain Lloyd had plenty of stories to relate of his fishing career that
began before WWII and without boasting he loved to share those colorful historical events with anybody that would
listen.
Captain Lloyd had stories of the war time German submarines that cruised the coastal waters along the American
seaboard and would steal his food, water, fuel and his catch in broad daylight but never damaged his vessel or
physically molested him in any way.
Eventually the US government put radios aboard all of the offshore shrimp fishing boats so that they could radio in
the positions of the enemy craft when they spotted them Captain Lloyd got his radio and did his duty.
Captain Lloyd told of known Nazi sympathizers up along the Georgia Sea Islands that stashed provisions for the
German subs and were never caught…a little known fact of war on the home front.
Politically Captain Lloyd made no bones about his Republican leanings and used to boast that it was President
Dwight Eisenhower who gave old St. Augustine the new dredged harbor entrance. This dredging was the first
improvement that the St. Augustine inlet had had in its entire four century plus years of maritime history.
Being well entrenched in the conservative camp of the old down-south Captain Lloyd was a solid member of the
Masonic Order that let him justify his bigoted behavior in a self righteous sort of way.
Over the years Jane and I both made numerous boat deliveries with elderly Captain Lloyd Wainwright to various
destinations; St. Petersburg, Tampa, Key West in Florida and Yucatan, Campeche, La Paz, Baja California and
Progreso in Mexico.
One of the boat deliveries would take over 28 days from St. Augustine, Florida to Panama and then on up the
Pacific Ocean to La Paz in Baja California.
Before we departed on that extensive trip Captain Lloyd, Jane and I all took Spanish lessons together at night
school.
Lloyd had a hard time with his Spanish and couldn’t quite understand why everybody didn’t just speak English.
Before that trip to Baja California was over old Captain Lloyd became known as “Wainwrong” instead of Wainwright.
I saw this with my very own eyes and still couldn’t believe it.
After our 28 day ocean to ocean voyage was nearly over and we had arrived in this uniquely beautiful enormous
bay surrounded by desert and barren mountains where the sea met the desert, there the Mexican outpost city of La
Paz was neatly nestled in the southeast protected corner awaiting our pending arrival.
As we approached we could visually see the port town of La Paz, Baja California in good daylight with the sun to our
backs.
Captain Lloyd aboard his brand new 75 foot 128 ton displacement Desco trawler that drew 11 feet of water took a
short cut across a sand bar that the chart clearly showed only had one fathom of water (six feet).
When I finally realized what Wainwright was doing, I quickly radioed him with my concerns but he wouldn’t listen and
just persisted.
At first he just bumped bottom and turned up clouds of billowing sand. This is normally enough to cause an
immediate response of throttle full back.
When a vessel of this size touches bottom the sensation is absolutely positively unnatural and alarmingly shocking
to any sailor. That is because it normally means eminent disaster…especially with a sea swell is running that will pick
up and crash the vessel on the bottom with each passing wave.
Reverse direction and determine your exact position and then re-plot a new course to good water is the
recommended procedure.
When I saw these first clouds of bottom sand turned up off the stern of Captain Lloyd’s vessel I immediately pulled
back my throttle keeping water beneath my keel.
Well, something must have turned to mush in the old man’s head because he doggedly persisted on his course into
shallower and shallower water bumping bottom heavily as he went.
In no time at all as his forward speed continued to diminish, he soon came to his final thudding halt. This time well
heeled over with a good measure of his boot-top exposed to the air above.
At this point in time one would think that any rational person would cease and desist. But no, not this stubborn, now
psychotic determined to doom old fool.
Black smoke began to bellow from the stack of this trembling vessel that took on the image of a suicidal whale
beaching itself spewing its last energy to assure death.
There was absolutely no discussion with this focused and determined one track mind of his.
Lloyd had it in his mind that he needed to persist and there would be absolutely no dissuading him.
The shadows of the late afternoon were coming upon us now and I took my vessel back around to the channel
entrance and entered by the marked buoys. Still I could not convince Lloyd that he was doing the wrong thing and at
that point I nicknamed him “Wainwrong” …a name that stuck with him for the rest of his years.
Lloyd got a small boat to carry a one inch nylon anchor line from his vessel over the sand bar to my vessel in the
main channel and then he wanted me to assist in pulling him across the sand bar to the deep water of the channel.
One inch nylon line has a breaking strength of 30, 000 plus pounds.
The two vessels were fastened together.
I should point out here that these vessels are engineered to serve as towing machines. With an excess of 500 shaft
horse power at 1,900 R.P.M.’s the five foot diameter propeller has a five foot pitch coupled to a 6 to one gear
reduction that made it a formidable tug boat.
An example of this power; with the engine set at idle speed of around 400 R.P.M.’s, if the shift lever is dropped into
reverse the prop wash pushing water under the transom will be sufficient to raise the stern about two feet out of the
water when the vessel is loaded with 28,000 gallons of fuel. Now that is real brute strength!
You now have the statistics and here is what happened; I slowly increased the engine revolutions and the nylon
towline came taut. Next a little more throttle and the water wrung out of the towline hawser.
Lloyd clearly was not happy and demanded that I increase the power further. It was not quite dark yet and I could
see that he was diligently full throttling his screaming engine and blowing black smoke from his poor stranded vessel
that now was just higher and drier than ever.
Well, I put the speed up and the nylon line began to stretch like a bowstring as it reduced in diameter under the
tremendous stress.
At a thousand R.P.M.’s I knew that this was all that this line could withstand but old curmudgeon Lloyd insisted I add
more power. I knew what would come next and got my crew off the back deck for the moment when the hawser
parted.
Part it did, just like a hand grenade going off, the explosion was incredible. Nylon does not part like a steel cable
stretched to the breaking point but the back lash is exactly the same.
Like a rubber band pulled to breaking this one inch nylon line under more than 30,000 pounds of tension, in less
than the blink of an eye, put a welt in the transom of our fiberglass hull like it had been slammed with a giant sledge
hammer and the end of that rope was then bull-whipped hopelessly tangled in our rigging. This was enough power
to break every bone in a man’s body and snatch his head off at the same time.
Now we would wait for the next morning’s sun.
The next day we were taken to shore and put up in a plush hotel with an unlimited food allowance by a company
representative we were delivering the vessel to.
I got this food allowance when I told the agent that our partner old Captain Lloyd Wainwrong had commandeered
our provisions when we transited the Panama Canal.
My crew and I had been out of provisions for three days when we arrived at La Paz.
We were past hungry…we were ravenous and physically running on fumes.
It was another day before Captain Lloyd Wainwrong’s vessel was finally pulled free of the sand bar. This feat was
accomplished by the Mexican Navy’s 300 foot coal burning battle ship.
I only wish that I had had my camera along because the town’s folk turned out just to witness the 300 foot coal
burning Mexican Navy ship drag a128 ton trawler through six feet of water.
Old Captain Lloyd Wainwrong was not a bad person and probably should have given up his seagoing adventures
when he had to quit his shrimp fishing due to prostrate cancer some years earlier…but he didn’t.
He was a very lucky old man because in spite of some monumentally colossal screw ups he did actually live to die of
old age at home.
Rick James; Ran the Victory II sight-seeing boat that docked and departed from the City Yacht Pier for Frank and
Betty Usina when we met him back in the mid-1970s.
Later the congenial enterprising Rick bought an old Harkers Island sport fishing boat, a classic of the 1940s and a
sister ship to Hemingway’s that he converted into a single rigged shrimp trawler that he got his fill of after only one
season of shrimping…at least he gave it his best shot.
Go-getter Rick also had a honey bee business on the side producing his own honey and sold his sweet product to
every boater in the anchorage...along with everyone else in town that he could corral.
These were the hippie drop-out days when back-to –the-earth natural products were sought after so Rick did a sell-
out business with all the home harvested honey that he could deliver…everybody was happy.
Rick was a real self motivated entrepreneur who was always searching out the magic product that would turn his
next dreamed up scheme into the American success story and his honey was always the best but it wasn’t making
him rich.
By and by Rick kept trying to find the magic product to build his financial empire upon and low-and-behold he finally
did it bottling concentrated commercial cleaning fluids.
His persistence finally got him hooked up with Wal-Mart as his customer and the rest is now history.
Straight-shooter home-grown Rick made his own luck and was a different type of social misfit, but a social misfit just
the same. His timing for getting into the commercial fishing business was extraordinarily poor but he did the right
thing and jumped ship.
next chapter
The snapper fishermen and their strange existence;
Forty miles from town doesn’t really seem like so far away after all that is only as far away as Jacksonville…a short
ride in a car.
Well forty miles from town is a long, long way when it is due east straight out to sea in the Atlantic Ocean especially
when the only thing between you and an infinitely endless sea is a flimsy, rickety, little old leaking worm eaten scow
with an engine well into its ninth life.
The mentality and motivation that drives a man to live on the edge of a very precarious existence cannot be
summed up in a few words.
These special men march to a different drummer fully aware of their perilous position perched on the edge of
eternity. They face the grim reaper every moment they are at sea.
Being out there in that realm of total self-reliance and being honestly faced with this reality then opens a new door to
another world few men will ever have the opportunity or balls to venture into.
These are the “salt water cowboys”.
They are not boisterous, brazen or brash.
They are solemn men, thinking men that take the time to live out there somewhere between earth and the cosmos.
Holding dear their reverent convictions based upon ponderous thoughts they quietly keep their world out to sea
locked up in their special private treasure chest.
Going out into their salty abyss, a week at a time riding at anchor hanging on to life by a thin thread in a ragged little
old worn out vessel that had passed its prime of life decades before these salt water cowboys return again and
again and press the outer limits to the proverbial limits.
Gordon Whitmore and others went out nearly 40 miles off the North Florida Coast at the edge of the Gulf Stream
and far away from any land and well out of the shipping lanes. This was a lonely isolated place, somewhere between
heaven and hell where the fickle finger of fate in the blink of an eye could send Mother Nature’s ranting rage to
terrorize and terrify.
These were the true “salt water cowboys” that lived by the seat of their pants. They were the last of the breed whose
wild independence drove these fearless free spirited men to the outer limits of the wild remoteness out upon the
open sea.
They lived every perilous moment out upon the very edge of disaster where they alone would fight the fight for their
life with a special survival instinct of marathon endurance for their continued existence.
There was one last long shot when push came to shove and a trip to the bottom appeared eminent…a call to the
Coast Guard got them off the hook and spared these salt water cowboys for yet another trip out to the edge the
abyss.
This life on the outer edge is not for everybody, it cannot be explained…it must be lived.
Dewitt Cowart was an old time southern gentleman with Deep South ancestry dating back in untraceable time to
the early days of St. Augustine’s founding.
Having learned how to live out of the river Dewitt fed his family being a commercial crab fisherman who worked for
himself and by himself living over on Sanford Street next to our friends Big Bob Baker and Beverly.
This part of St. Augustine had been in its day a very nice neighborhood, not stately but solid and was in the process
of slipping into a marginal status when Bob and Beverly Baker started turning it around with their artful upgrades
and elegant renovations.
Jane and I got to know easy going and friendly Dewitt when our friends Bob and Beverly Baker bought their four-plex
apartment house next door.
Dewitt’s classic old vintage home was an interesting Victorian style house that in its bygone day was elegant with
fancy handsomely stylish beveled glass windows and excessive gingerbread bric-a-brac wood adornments that were
gradually slipping into a state of irreversible neglect.
Dewitt was getting old and losing his drive to advancing years and his lovely old house was going down with him.
Old Dewitt made and repaired all his own crab traps by hand, which he had been doing all his life and worked them
in St. Augustine’s waterways without any help, which gave him a meager hard earned income.
Dewitt’s roots went way back on the St. Augustine waterfront and he knew all of the old time commercial fisherman,
their histories and loved to recollect interesting stories about all those salty rogues and seafaring social misfits.
We had many mutual friends in the area fishing industry including our old friends George Tappin and Dick Janson
who were both salty and seafaring fisherman that gained the knowledge of their trade by working up through the
ranks as was the way of the day.
In Dewitt’s lifetime the St. Augustine commercial fishing industry was born and he was there, a part of it, to see it all
happen, now he was a part of a vanishing breed and an industry that was sinking away from him.
I used to buy my crab traps from Dewitt and he always treated me right on the price. Dewitt would tell me that I was
the only one in town and in fact in his whole lifetime that had actually paid him for a crab trap. I know he deeply
appreciated my integrity because he would go on to tell how many traps that had been stolen and how many he
would find pilfered and plundered.
I can still recall Dewitt saying in disgust that the pilferers not only stole his catch and livelihood but that they wouldn’t
even have the decency to at least close the traps after stealing the contents.
Dewitt’s crab fishing was very backbreaking and labor intensive. He got low pay and it was seasonal so it is hard for
me to imagine that any person would stoop to stealing from such a poor honest and hard working man as he…but
Dewitt suffered his losses and resolutely carried on.
Things might have been different when Dewitt was a young man and the rivers and bays abounded with seafood,
but now Dewitt was old, the river only marginally productive and the overhead too high to contemplate new
beginnings.
Dewitt’s beautiful daughter married one of the wealthiest people in town a man named Gregg Baker from the
Thompson, Bailey Baker Insurance Co.
Though Dewitt fished the inland rivers and bays he didn’t qualify as a river rat…he was commercially engaged in the
seafood industry.
Lloyd Wainwright and his chronically allergic to everything wife Caroline lived in west St. Augustine at 8 Eastman
Street in a modest little middle class unpretentious house in an unassuming neighborhood leading a quiet and very
unpretentious life.
Jane and I had already made several shrimp boat deliveries around the state of Florida with Captain Wainwright
when he signed the guest book aboard our boat Dursmirg October 17, 1975 and he wrote; “To two of the nicest
people I know.”
Gray and mostly balding old Captain Lloyd had been a shrimp boat owner and a substantial part of the interesting,
intriguing and very colorful St. Augustine fishing fleet history all of his life.
Old Captain Lloyd had no formal education in seamanship or navigation and learned all his boat handling skills by
trial and error as most of his local fellow fishing associates had done and then boated by the seat of their pants.
Mature and methodical matter-of-fact old Captain Lloyd had plenty of stories to relate of his fishing career that
began before WWII and without boasting he loved to share those colorful historical events with anybody that would
listen.
Captain Lloyd had stories of the war time German submarines that cruised the coastal waters along the American
seaboard and would steal his food, water, fuel and his catch in broad daylight but never damaged his vessel or
physically molested him in any way.
Eventually the US government put radios aboard all of the offshore shrimp fishing boats so that they could radio in
the positions of the enemy craft when they spotted them Captain Lloyd got his radio and did his duty.
Captain Lloyd told of known Nazi sympathizers up along the Georgia Sea Islands that stashed provisions for the
German subs and were never caught…a little known fact of war on the home front.
Politically Captain Lloyd made no bones about his Republican leanings and used to boast that it was President
Dwight Eisenhower who gave old St. Augustine the new dredged harbor entrance. This dredging was the first
improvement that the St. Augustine inlet had had in its entire four century plus years of maritime history.
Being well entrenched in the conservative camp of the old down-south Captain Lloyd was a solid member of the
Masonic Order that let him justify his bigoted behavior in a self righteous sort of way.
Over the years Jane and I both made numerous boat deliveries with elderly Captain Lloyd Wainwright to various
destinations; St. Petersburg, Tampa, Key West in Florida and Yucatan, Campeche, La Paz, Baja California and
Progreso in Mexico.
One of the boat deliveries would take over 28 days from St. Augustine, Florida to Panama and then on up the
Pacific Ocean to La Paz in Baja California.
Before we departed on that extensive trip Captain Lloyd, Jane and I all took Spanish lessons together at night
school.
Lloyd had a hard time with his Spanish and couldn’t quite understand why everybody didn’t just speak English.
Before that trip to Baja California was over old Captain Lloyd became known as “Wainwrong” instead of Wainwright.
I saw this with my very own eyes and still couldn’t believe it.
After our 28 day ocean to ocean voyage was nearly over and we had arrived in this uniquely beautiful enormous
bay surrounded by desert and barren mountains where the sea met the desert, there the Mexican outpost city of La
Paz was neatly nestled in the southeast protected corner awaiting our pending arrival.
As we approached we could visually see the port town of La Paz, Baja California in good daylight with the sun to our
backs.
Captain Lloyd aboard his brand new 75 foot 128 ton displacement Desco trawler that drew 11 feet of water took a
short cut across a sand bar that the chart clearly showed only had one fathom of water (six feet).
When I finally realized what Wainwright was doing, I quickly radioed him with my concerns but he wouldn’t listen and
just persisted.
At first he just bumped bottom and turned up clouds of billowing sand. This is normally enough to cause an
immediate response of throttle full back.
When a vessel of this size touches bottom the sensation is absolutely positively unnatural and alarmingly shocking
to any sailor. That is because it normally means eminent disaster…especially with a sea swell is running that will pick
up and crash the vessel on the bottom with each passing wave.
Reverse direction and determine your exact position and then re-plot a new course to good water is the
recommended procedure.
When I saw these first clouds of bottom sand turned up off the stern of Captain Lloyd’s vessel I immediately pulled
back my throttle keeping water beneath my keel.
Well, something must have turned to mush in the old man’s head because he doggedly persisted on his course into
shallower and shallower water bumping bottom heavily as he went.
In no time at all as his forward speed continued to diminish, he soon came to his final thudding halt. This time well
heeled over with a good measure of his boot-top exposed to the air above.
At this point in time one would think that any rational person would cease and desist. But no, not this stubborn, now
psychotic determined to doom old fool.
Black smoke began to bellow from the stack of this trembling vessel that took on the image of a suicidal whale
beaching itself spewing its last energy to assure death.
There was absolutely no discussion with this focused and determined one track mind of his.
Lloyd had it in his mind that he needed to persist and there would be absolutely no dissuading him.
The shadows of the late afternoon were coming upon us now and I took my vessel back around to the channel
entrance and entered by the marked buoys. Still I could not convince Lloyd that he was doing the wrong thing and at
that point I nicknamed him “Wainwrong” …a name that stuck with him for the rest of his years.
Lloyd got a small boat to carry a one inch nylon anchor line from his vessel over the sand bar to my vessel in the
main channel and then he wanted me to assist in pulling him across the sand bar to the deep water of the channel.
One inch nylon line has a breaking strength of 30, 000 plus pounds.
The two vessels were fastened together.
I should point out here that these vessels are engineered to serve as towing machines. With an excess of 500 shaft
horse power at 1,900 R.P.M.’s the five foot diameter propeller has a five foot pitch coupled to a 6 to one gear
reduction that made it a formidable tug boat.
An example of this power; with the engine set at idle speed of around 400 R.P.M.’s, if the shift lever is dropped into
reverse the prop wash pushing water under the transom will be sufficient to raise the stern about two feet out of the
water when the vessel is loaded with 28,000 gallons of fuel. Now that is real brute strength!
You now have the statistics and here is what happened; I slowly increased the engine revolutions and the nylon
towline came taut. Next a little more throttle and the water wrung out of the towline hawser.
Lloyd clearly was not happy and demanded that I increase the power further. It was not quite dark yet and I could
see that he was diligently full throttling his screaming engine and blowing black smoke from his poor stranded vessel
that now was just higher and drier than ever.
Well, I put the speed up and the nylon line began to stretch like a bowstring as it reduced in diameter under the
tremendous stress.
At a thousand R.P.M.’s I knew that this was all that this line could withstand but old curmudgeon Lloyd insisted I add
more power. I knew what would come next and got my crew off the back deck for the moment when the hawser
parted.
Part it did, just like a hand grenade going off, the explosion was incredible. Nylon does not part like a steel cable
stretched to the breaking point but the back lash is exactly the same.
Like a rubber band pulled to breaking this one inch nylon line under more than 30,000 pounds of tension, in less
than the blink of an eye, put a welt in the transom of our fiberglass hull like it had been slammed with a giant sledge
hammer and the end of that rope was then bull-whipped hopelessly tangled in our rigging. This was enough power
to break every bone in a man’s body and snatch his head off at the same time.
Now we would wait for the next morning’s sun.
The next day we were taken to shore and put up in a plush hotel with an unlimited food allowance by a company
representative we were delivering the vessel to.
I got this food allowance when I told the agent that our partner old Captain Lloyd Wainwrong had commandeered
our provisions when we transited the Panama Canal.
My crew and I had been out of provisions for three days when we arrived at La Paz.
We were past hungry…we were ravenous and physically running on fumes.
It was another day before Captain Lloyd Wainwrong’s vessel was finally pulled free of the sand bar. This feat was
accomplished by the Mexican Navy’s 300 foot coal burning battle ship.
I only wish that I had had my camera along because the town’s folk turned out just to witness the 300 foot coal
burning Mexican Navy ship drag a128 ton trawler through six feet of water.
Old Captain Lloyd Wainwrong was not a bad person and probably should have given up his seagoing adventures
when he had to quit his shrimp fishing due to prostrate cancer some years earlier…but he didn’t.
He was a very lucky old man because in spite of some monumentally colossal screw ups he did actually live to die of
old age at home.
Rick James; Ran the Victory II sight-seeing boat that docked and departed from the City Yacht Pier for Frank and
Betty Usina when we met him back in the mid-1970s.
Later the congenial enterprising Rick bought an old Harkers Island sport fishing boat, a classic of the 1940s and a
sister ship to Hemingway’s that he converted into a single rigged shrimp trawler that he got his fill of after only one
season of shrimping…at least he gave it his best shot.
Go-getter Rick also had a honey bee business on the side producing his own honey and sold his sweet product to
every boater in the anchorage...along with everyone else in town that he could corral.
These were the hippie drop-out days when back-to –the-earth natural products were sought after so Rick did a sell-
out business with all the home harvested honey that he could deliver…everybody was happy.
Rick was a real self motivated entrepreneur who was always searching out the magic product that would turn his
next dreamed up scheme into the American success story and his honey was always the best but it wasn’t making
him rich.
By and by Rick kept trying to find the magic product to build his financial empire upon and low-and-behold he finally
did it bottling concentrated commercial cleaning fluids.
His persistence finally got him hooked up with Wal-Mart as his customer and the rest is now history.
Straight-shooter home-grown Rick made his own luck and was a different type of social misfit, but a social misfit just
the same. His timing for getting into the commercial fishing business was extraordinarily poor but he did the right
thing and jumped ship.
next chapter
Pictured on the left is one of the
last of the old time shrimpers to
shrimp out of St. Augustine. this is
a fully rigged and ready to fish
vessel that was a regular visitor to
the local waters. The Backman
brothers kept their family owned
fleet of vessels in prime condition
and seriously fished out of St.
Augustine in the fall for white
shrimp on their way south to
partake in the Key West winter
season where they would land the
pink gulf shrimp.
In the above photo Backman
Elizabeth stands off the City Yacht
Pier and is part of the annual
blessing of the fleet.
last of the old time shrimpers to
shrimp out of St. Augustine. this is
a fully rigged and ready to fish
vessel that was a regular visitor to
the local waters. The Backman
brothers kept their family owned
fleet of vessels in prime condition
and seriously fished out of St.
Augustine in the fall for white
shrimp on their way south to
partake in the Key West winter
season where they would land the
pink gulf shrimp.
In the above photo Backman
Elizabeth stands off the City Yacht
Pier and is part of the annual
blessing of the fleet.
