| TRAVELS OF DURSMIRG VOLUME IV THE ROGUES OF ST. AUGUSTINE AND OTHER SOCIAL MISFITS Chapter 44 |
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BOAT DELIVERIES FROM ST. AUGUSTINE BUILDERS; and the people that made them happen.
Steve Stefano was one of a number of area people that got sucked into taking part in the actual process of getting
the finished product of St. Augustine’s trawler industry to the end user…the buyer where ever in the world his port
might have been.
Steve was also known as the “Russian” in and around St. Augustine because Steve’s origins were from the Eastern
block of Europe and he had a very thick unmistakable East-block accent.
Stocky smiley Steve had just purchased a neat little shrimp trawler named Little Joe whose diesel engine belched
and blew a steady stream of black smoke distinctively visible from miles away anywhere out in the fishing fleet.
Continuously chomping on his stubby soggy putrid smelling cigar whose acrid smoke relentlessly burned squinting
Steve’s eyes as the “Little Joe” floundered around hopelessly catching nearly nothing.
The Little Joe promptly fell victim to Steve’s unethical, non mechanical and non nautical innovative alterations.
Steve installed an air horn that was powered off the vessels LP gas cylinder. What made matters so bad was the
fact that Steve’s plumbing abilities and attention to detail were lacking in the extreme.
It is hard for me even now to get a mental image of lackadaisical nonchalant Steve showing Jane and I his new
shrimp boat and demonstrating his new air horn installation.
This air horn was connected through a leaky valve that sent raw LP gas fumes flooding into the wheelhouse in a
thick rolling cloud when Steve would proudly give a demonstration of his newly rigged air-horn while chomping squint-
eyed from the acrid smoke dragging on his glowing cigar.
Why he didn’t blow himself up to kingdom-come and take a trip to the moon with that caper I will never understand.
In spite of all of the left handed praise I have previously dished out to Steve he was not totally the village idiot. As a
mater of fact Steve had been trained into a very specialized and demanding profession, Steve just happened to be
Desco Marine’s head pattern maker.
These are the people that make the precision molds that will ultimately reflect the shape of the finished product.
Desco Marine headquartered in St. Augustine was the world’s largest producers of trawlers and they proudly
claimed on their logo that “The Sun Never Sets on a Desco Trawler.”
Desco Marine also boasted at the time to have the world’s largest production model fiberglass vessel with their 75-
footer that displaced 128 tons.
Steve made all of the molds for Desco Marine and they were exquisitely crafted precision works of art.
Steve, “The Russian” had flawlessly made the precision patterns for the world’s largest production fiberglass boats
at the time. At his trade he was right up there with the best of the industry leaders for quality and craftsmanship but
when it came for his own innovations poor Steve was an absolute bungler.
Here is a brief look into Steve’s boating background; between production changes at Desco Marine Steve would
have some slack time on his hands and this is when he got enticed into making some boat deliveries by his next
door neighbor, the retired local shrimp boat owner, Lloyd Wainwright. Lloyd had been a lifelong shrimp boat owner
and operator in St. Augustine and was forced into selling his own shrimp trawler and retirement due to prostrate
cancer.
Old Lloyd knew boats and the sea from years of boating experiences by trial and error but he was an absolute
positive neophyte when it came to navigation with absolutely no schooling or training in chart reading. Captain Lloyd’
s navigational abilities were limited to using a compass and depth sounder and he would then feel his way along the
coast and employ his instincts to do his seat-of the-pants navigation. That was sufficient for most of the boat
deliveries he made for Desco Marine.
Remember these were the days before Loran and Sat-nav, so dead reckoning was how most coastal fishing
seafarers got around back in those days.
Lloyd had no notion of ocean currents, celestial navigation or international rules of the road that included identifying
any navigational lights, ships lights, or right of way rules. Desco Marine wasn’t looking for rocket scientists and if
Lloyd got a little lost or confused; what the heck, diesel fuel was cheap enough back then. Besides the vessels were
all insured and under the worst case scenario if the trawler was lost at sea Desco would get to build yet another, this
time at the expense of the insurance company.
OK, so Steve Stefano gets enticed into a boat delivery with his neighbor Lloyd Wainwright. Well, this isn’t just any
boat delivery; this one would take nearly a month.
The first leg of the trip was to Progresso in Yucatan peninsula of Mexico for fuel. The vessels capacity was 28,000
gallons of diesel fuel, which took three days to load being transported from Merida in a relay team of small trucks.
The trawlers glutinously consumed 40 gallons of fuel per hour.
The next leg of the trip took us on down through the Caribbean to the Panama Canal and next up the Pacific coast
of Central America to Baja California in western Mexico, a 28 day journey. (I was captaining the second vessel.)
I never did get the full explanation of just what happened between Steve and Lloyd on this deliver trip but they never
ever spoke to each other again after this trip was over and they were next door neighbors.
Being out to sea puts heavy strains on volatile personalities and this was just too much for these two.
One possible explanation for the personal alienation was that Lloyd was such a cheap bugger especially with his
crew and loved to put the pinch on their bellies. On Lloyd’s boat the food rations were stingily meager.
His frugality stepped over the line with me when we provisioned at the Panama Canal. Lloyd commandeered all of
the provisions for our vessel and I nearly came to blows with him to get some of it back. As it was we were so short of
provisions that we ran out of food and went the last three days into La Paz, Baja California with nothing to eat.
This was not a moral builder!
Well, at least my crew and I made up for lost time in La Paz with a two day eating extravaganza that the sympathetic
Mexican boat owner sprung for.
That boat trip was Steve’s first boating experience of his life and he evidently liked the sea and boats because
before you knew it Steve went out and bought himself his very own little shrimp trawler.
Jane and I felt sorry for poor Steve with his little shrimp boat because he had invested a lot of money and even
mortgaged his house to buy the boat.
Steve just wasn’t catching any shrimp so we offered to give him some help finding where to put his nets down.
It turned out in the end that helping Steve was a dreadful mistake for us.
To be helpful we told Steve that he could follow us while we were out trawling.
Well, when Steve spotted us he clamped on to our stern like a bloodsucker hungrily hanging on for our blood.
Steve and his black smoke belching Little Joe doggedly tagged along tight on our tail. I swear I could even see his
grimaced face as he chomping down hard on his acrid stinking saliva soaked cigar with its gray smoke curling up
and watering his eyes as he cut us off at every turn while we desperately tried to put some distance between our two
vessels.
It was no wonder that poor Steve wasn’t catching any shrimp; he had absolutely no concept of the relationship of his
boat to his trawl nets or ours either for that matter as we were soon to discover.
Steve had utterly no concept of where our nets were in relation to our boat and we came very close to losing our
whole rig as Steve cut closer and closer to our dearly beloved little Secotan.
(This is our Secotan securely tied off and resting in our front yard adjacent to our dock up Hospital
Creek after a long shrimping season.)
The situation was now approaching the critical point of irreversible damage and I could feel the anxious panicky
sensation of fretful sweat flowing as my heart rate raced and ran wild driven by the adrenalin rush of my unnerved
nervous system.
I am afraid that I must have blackened the airways with my prolific profanity screaming bad language into the VHF
microphone directing Steve to back off and keep his distance. After some years out to sea my sailor’s repertoire of
expletives was well stockpiled and I could lay out a long and protracted string of these off-color adjectives and
expletives without any repetitions.
The rest of the fishing fleet took note of Steve’s behavior and passed along some slide humorous remarks on the
VHF radio like; looks like you are dragging Steve around today…don’t you think you need to cut the man a little
slack…Steve?
So much for helping, Steve was not cut out to be a boater or a shrimper for that matter, but he sure knew how to
build them.
Dick Janson was a tough old witty Swede. Keen minded cynical humored Dick was sharp as a tack, quick as a
wink, sprightly, spry with a spring in his step and almost eighty years old at the time we began making boat deliveries
together.
A word about Dick Janson’s long maritime life;
When Dick was a young man, he left Sweden to escape the military service and took a seaman’s deck job aboard a
British square-rigged freight hauling sailing schooner.
The schooner hauled nearly any class of freight and was known then as a Baltic trader.
Dick told me that he only made one trip aboard that vessel because he was sent aloft high up to the mast-head to
grease the standing rigging with nothing but a boat swain’s chair in a wild horrendously heavy storm driven sea.
After that trip, Dick not only hated the British, he would never again set foot aboard another sailing ship and he
made sure he let everyone he met know his exact sentiments.
Eventually Dick came to America and made his life’s career as a commercial fisherman.
Weather wise, old Dick learned the commercial fishing business from the bottom up along with all of the waterfront
rascals he ran with that made up the backbone of the industry.
Over the years he fished out of Cape May, New Jersey, Cape Canaveral, Key West and St. Augustine, Florida.
I spent many a happy hour out to sea listening to seasoned salty tough old Dick’s recollections of his personal
distinctive sea stories that he loved to tell and embellish upon with a sparkle in his eye that would light up with
laughter.
His life’s experiences at sea would easily fill the pages of a heavy volume and I will only in a few words mention a
couple of those intriguing stories here.
This story took place at Cape Canaveral, Florida when Dick was captaining one of the largest shrimp trawlers afloat
back in those days and it was powered by two 13000 Caterpillar engines.
As a killer hurricane brewed its way up the coast of the sunshine state Captain Dick Jansen was making the best of
a very bad situation.
Anchored off shore near the port at Cape Canaveral Dick had put down his two largest anchors. Then he nailed
down the hatches tightly sealing them with spikes and made his last inspections of the vessel before the impending
storm made venturing out on deck an absolute impossibility.
Dick wasn’t alone out there anchored off this desolate Florida shore. Built like an ox, he and his vessel was one of
the seven trawlers facing the forces of the unrelenting methodically advancing hurricane.
The light dancing mist slanting and swirling out of swiftly passing blue-gray clouds rapidly changed to a heavy
pelting horizontally slanting downpour from un-discernibly blue-black clouds as the storms fury built into a deafening
roar.
The storm blasted uncompromisingly and unmercifully throughout this excruciatingly long black night as resolute
Dick had both of his 13000 Caterpillar engines pressed to their limits and screaming at top RPM to take some of the
stress and strain out of the pressed to their limit anchor lines stretched tighter than bow strings.
There is no rest or sleep under these conditions where the noise level is totally deafening and only the adrenalin
driven anxiety of frightful fear knowing that the screaming shattering unrelenting rage of this demon storm could at
any instant send this ship and its crew catapulting down wind and into a watery grave.
Riding through this hellacious nocturnal torment of towering crashing seas filled with stupendous thunderous storm
driven spindrift would push any sane person’s nerves to the point of near numbness.
The following morning as the bleak weather darkened sun slowly brightened this storm gloomy gray tempest stricken
morning, an exhausted and nerve shattered Dick was shocked by what he first saw.
Dick and his vessel were the only survivors…his six anchored neighbors had been lost during this nightmarish
protracted night of hell to the unforgiving devastation of Mother Nature at her worst.
The huge storm driven seas were so churned and violent that the sea bottom was plowed high up and became
commingled with the wind driven spindrift that deposited nearly eight inches of sea bottom sand and shell upon the
decks of Dick’s nearly defeated storm weary vessel.
It was late that afternoon before the killer storm relented adequately and enough to let beaten down Dick pull up his
anchors and head into port and dock.
When exhausted and physically drained Dick numbed, beaten and drained by the experience finally managed to ply
his way home that night his three young sons all wanted him to take them to the movies and weren’t even interested
in hearing a word of his heroic tale of survival when Dick looked the Grim Reaper squarely in the eye.
The National Fisherman magazine did a feature article about Dick Janson in their yearbook addition which I thought
was a real tribute to a man that had devoted his entire lifetime to the fishing industry. You will find the story in
Volume 4 postscript, chapter 66.
BOAT DELIVERIES;
In the early 1970s Jane and I made our first boat delivery together from St. Augustine to Tampa, Florida aboard a
78 foot wooden trawler built at St. Augustine Trawlers, St. Augustine’s second largest builder.
This was my second trawler delivery. We conveniently had our boat Dursmirg tied at Xynides Boat Yard at the time
plus I was convalescing from a broken shoulder that was nearly healed.
There were two identical boats on this delivery that went together on this trip. Jane and I were aboard one of the
vessels along with Lloyd Wainwright in this winter passage of 1972-1973.
Dick Janson and our friend George Tappin were aboard the second vessel. Because of the vessels draft of nearly
11 feet we had to go all the way down to Key West, up the Northwest Channel and then nearly due north up to
Tampa Bay, our final destination. With a lesser draft vessel it would have been possible to cut across the state on
the Okeechobee canal with its five locks and then cut the trips length in half. Another option with a lesser draft would
have been to cut through the Old Spanish channel near Marathon down in the Florida Keys and that would have
sawed nearly 150 miles off our total trip.
As we followed the east coast of Florida south from St. Augustine all the way to Key West we would transverse the
waters of the Bermuda Triangle with its maritime traffic so thick and congested that I used to joke, “The boats should
be fitted with rear-view mirrors”.
To add to the adventure we had a roly-poly ride in the Straits of Florida that would unrelentingly stand you on your
head in your bunk and next stand you up with each roll and pitch of the vessel.
These brand new vessels were fitted out with the minimum of basic equipment that did not include stabilizers. The
only wheel-house equipment was; compass, depth recorder, and auto-pilot.
In order to give some prospective of the wave size and steepness we encountered rounding the Keys here is what
the wave action did besides washing the decks; it even left flying fish high up on our wheel house top that was more
than twelve feet above the sea. Next we were bewildered by what greeted us as we entered the Gulf of Mexico.
After rounding the Florida Keys to Key West we took the Northwest Channel that led us up into the unmistakable
Coke-bottle green waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
If this had been our only visit to the Gulf of Mexico our impression would have been that it was just a big mill-pond
because it was so inky smooth and calm that we actually could have taken a canoe on this trip. With a gray sky
reflecting into a featureless gray sea the eerie sensation was of our vessel sluggishly floating in outer space. This
eerie sensation was only occasionally broken by some sea bird or playful bottle nose dolphins breaking the ghostly
placidity of the inky lazy slow rolling gentle swells.
I assure you this impression of tranquility was broken numerous times on future crossings of the Coke-bottle green
Gulf of Mexico when true terror was dealt out by Mother Nature who made sure that we fought for our very survival.
All I can say about the above subject is that if you haven’t experienced the true terror of Mother Nature’s sea wrath
you either haven’t been out there or you are just too dense to know you ought to be scared and in that case your
days will be numbered. You will not live long out upon the high seas.
As it was this two and a half day trip turned out to be a real learning experience for both Jane and I. This vessel was
the largest we had ever handled up to this point.
Our navigational skills were put to the test because these vessels were only equipped with a compass, depth
sounder and auto-pilot. We had to use our dead-reckoning skills, plotting our course upon the chart. An accurate
and complete log-book with times of bearings, watches, vessel abnormalities and sightings were recorded and
noted. Our hand bearing compass gave us lines of position but the old timers taught us many tricks not found in the
text books. Reading the water color for depth is obvious but reading the underside of clouds to spot islands, shoals
and distant land were used by day and at night besides the stars we looked for distant faint luminescence that told
of far off cities.
On later trips I can still remember seeing the luminescent glow off shore from distant Merida, Yucatan, Mexico as we
crossed the Gulf of Mexico from Florida. This was our first indication of land ahead after that 500 mile open sea
crossing of the Gulf.
Back in those days very little of the Yucatan peninsula was electrified so even though Merida was 20 miles in from
the coast against the black sky its night lights gave us a true bearing. (Remember these were the days before Loran
was readably available to the boating public…now its day is long past and Loran has been replaced by inexpensive
GPS systems and even made non-sailors into navigators...just as long as the batteries didn’t go dead.)
Here I must interject an interesting twist of fate;
In 1969 Jane and I were married and we took our honeymoon trip, which I had won from a company I was doing
business with to Mexico City and Acapulco. We had a choice of two weeks in Europe or two weeks in the Caribbean.
We chose Mexico because we figured that was one place we would never ever return to.
In 1973 here I was four years later back in Mexico.
Ten years after these boat deliveries Jane and I began our transition that eventually led to our Mexican residence in
Yucatan.
Delivery trips to Mexico;
My first foreign boat deliveries were to Campeche, Mexico on the western side of the Yucatan Peninsula.
The trawler builder, Desco was a subsidiary of Whittaker Corporation that had purchased all the correct politicians
who in turn fashioned and bent all the proper legislation so that the American tax payer would pick up the tab and
underwrite Desco’s somewhat dubious business dealings.
Everybody got screwed in the end except for the fat portly bankers, the bought-off sycophantic suck-up politicians
and of course Desco who sold lots of their very high priced trawlers.
Trips to Mexico were different than other trips because we were fully loaded with cargo both in the hold and on our
decks. The hold would be jam packed with household appliances that wouldn’t like the salt spray. The deck would be
heavy laden have large spools of steel trawl cable, propellers and propeller shafts.
Evidently the Mexican buyers of these brand new state of the art trawlers had some cozy connections with the
Mexican customs agents because all of this merchandise was never inventoried leaving the States or arriving in
Mexico.
(I have always maintained that if the Mexicans wanted to take lessons in corruption they would have to come to
Florida.)
The deck cargo all was extremely heavy, very unwieldy and needed to be loaded and unloaded by crane. The
bronze propellers were five feet in diameter with a five foot pitch and the stainless steel propeller shafts were more
than 20 feet in length and six inches in diameter.
The reason I mention this is that these items were dreadfully heavy and that on more than one occasion we were
caught out in mountainous seas when the lashings holding our deck cargo gave way as the vessel violently pitched
and rolled like a run-away wagon. Of course in almost every incidence these calamities would only occur in the
bleakest dead of night.
This was enough to send us to the bottom when this enormously heavy deck cargo came rolling and sliding from
one side of the pitching and yawing vessel to the other. With a 25 foot beam the cargo had plenty of space to pick
up enough momentum coming down the steeply inclined deck to tear the gunwales out of the leeward side.
Remember that these were fiberglass hulls that could sustain heavy impact but would be subject to tearing at the
deck joints with high torque stress.
The pitch of the vessel as the bow would rise and the fall was determined by the forward speed of our vessel
entering the on coming seas or in the case of a following sea the rate at which the sea swell overtook our vessel
from astern.
In an open seaway with lots of water under our keel this action was normally rhythmical in cadence with cycloidal
waves.
When a wind-storm piped up the sea’s split personality gave you a look at the other side this water world. The waves
went from a gentle rolling rounded cycloidal to sharp jagged white crested fast moving monsters whose tops blow off
in spindrift. This is when the vessel would become hard to steer and the auto-pilot would laboriously and
unceasingly grind and groan, ineffective in holding course.
If the seas crossed the beam of the vessel it would yaw or roll from side to side and depending upon the ballasted
center of gravity which wanted to right itself.
The time of return completing a full side to side roll depended upon the steepness of the sea and the center of
gravity of the vessel. These seas eventually built to the point that they would roll you out of your bunk and pitch your
meal onto the galley floor.
Most often the seas would quarter the vessel causing the craft to both pitch and yaw simultaneously confusing the
autopilot and crew.
These rhythmus motions would be programmed into every seaman’s mind and dictate his every move. One hand for
the ship was always the rule of sea survival.
The number one rule of boating was that the water was supposed to be on the outside, not the inside.
If you can imagine in the middle of the hellish night with huge pounding seas breaking over the decks that sent waist
deep waves of water gushing across the decks while the cargo was ceaselessly loosening its restrainers and
charging around the deck sliding down hill with each roll driven by relentlessly oncoming seas hell bent on sending
your vessel to the bottom.
This is where the term “Salt Water Cowboy” applies. Like riding a bucking bronco and attempting to lasso a stray
bull, here we were. The added feature of being doused and submerged wave after wave while being charged by the
momentum driven, now constantly moving deck cargo that was doing its best to maim, mangle and mutilate us and
destroy the ship made our lasso job a fiendish nightmare. Persistence was imperative because the alternative of
failure meant a watery grave. The real incentive was just in knowing that absolutely no assistance was coming and if
we wanted to greet another sunrise you must prevail. With the utmost of diligence there are no second chances
here.
Dick Janson and I made several trips to Mexico, across the Coke-bottle green waters of the Gulf of Mexico and
down into the Bay of Campeche.
From the port of the ancient walled Spanish colonial city of Campeche we would next have to bus up to the most
beautiful colonial Merida in the state of Yucatan, then known as the “white city”. From Merida we would then fly back
home to Florida.
Docking in Campeche waiting to clear all of the bureaucratic B.S. for ourselves and the vessel was an experience
that few visitors to Mexico would believe existed. Tied to the dock with our yellow quarantine flag flying meant that we
were not allowed to set foot ashore or allow anyone other than the proper officials aboard. To make sure that we
followed these rules the Mexicans stationed half a dozen machine-gun wielding military on the dock that had the
appearance of skipping their grade school classes and would just love to try out their heavy weapons just for kicks.
This was when I knew that I was in a third world country and that I would want to learn to speak some Spanish
because I had discovered that I was a prisoner of language or the lack of it.
We sort of communicated with the young Mexican military guys and they didn’t have any trouble finding a way to
bum cigarettes from my crew.
My first tool in communicating with these youngsters dressed as military guards was this phrase that is a big help in
basic communication; “Como se dise en Español?” or how do you say in Spanish? Then you use hand signals to
elicit the proper response. Soon you will know enough Spanish to get in trouble.
As one of my crew members, Bob Baker, used to say about the Mexican bureaucracy back in those days; “The
Mexican authorities nail one of your feet to the dock when you arrive and then you run around in circles for three
days signing papers before they let you go.” Now that wasn’t too much of a stretch of the imagination. We were
American crew bringing vessels that left the US flying American flags and then three miles off shore we then flew
Mexican flags. To top this all off these vessels carried American mortgages and were being delivered to Mexican
buyers.
These complications were enough to guarantee an already bureaucratic Mexican functionary into his full fledged job
security.
I soon found out in Mexico that the head functionary was the guy with the most rubber stamps on his desk.
How is that for a convoluted bureaucrats dream come true?
With only three flights back to the US each week in those days we had time on our hands in Merida and got to know
some of this lovely “Ciudad Blanca” or White City. This is where I got my very first Spanish lessons and we jokingly
used to say that it was possible to become perfectly fluent in Spanish in only one night in the cantina. The only
problem than was that you couldn’t remember a single word the next day.
A word about Merida; In all of my travels throughout my life up until this time I had never visited any place quite like
this unique one-of-a-kind quiet clean quaint easy going and friendly city.
In 1973 the quiet colonial city of Mérida had 175,000 people and was literally isolated from the rest of the world. Until
1960 when the first paved road from outside the Yucatan Peninsula was built.
The residents of Yucatan do not regard themselves as Mexicans and if they are asked they will reply; “no, we are
Yucatecan”. The Yucatecans considered Mexicans to be primarily foreign people from the city of Mexico or the north
of the country.
In the early 1970s over half of the residents of the state of Yucatan still lived in thatched roof homes called palapas,
as they have for the previous several thousand years. There were only three gasoline stations in the entire city of
Mérida and no stop lights.
Yucatan was a century behind the rest of the world and still had one of the last narrow gauge railroads still in
operation.
The quarter inch thick phone book covered the entire state of Yucatan and the two adjoining states.
Most of the taxis in Mérida were horse drawn carriages called calesas.
There were only three flights a week back to the U.S. in those days so we got to mingle with the natives and being
sailors that meant visiting many of the roughest toughest cantinas in town where the clientele drank to drunken
oblivion.
If you ventured out on the street early in the morning in those days it was common to see borrachos, (drunks) still
passed out on the pavement where they had conked out the previous night.
On one of our delivery trips we visited a cantina the night before we were to fly out and it was packed with very
friendly drunks that insisted that we all drink together as they called us “amigos”. They ordered several bottles of
booze delivered to their table and my crew and I drank beer.
When it was time for my crew and I to take our departure the waiter presented us with the tab for the entire group.
We of course protested and refused to pick up the tab for our newly acquired “amigos”.
The next morning when we left our hotel headed for the airport in our taxi we passed through the central plaza on
the way.
Wow! There in a steel cage made of stout steel bars perched up upon the back of a flatbed truck were our “amigos”
from the night before obviously on their way to jail and they weren’t even there yet.
Somehow we got the impression that the Mexican justice system was going to be heavy handed, and I learned a
very important lesson…don’t ever get in trouble in Mexico!
Our trips became extended because of our return home flight and coordinating our transportation. From St.
Augustine to Campeche bouncing through the briny sea at ten and an half knots it took about five days depending
upon the weather and sea conditions. Then next contending with the Mexican bureaucrats, the airplane connections
and the logistics in between turned our five day delivery trip into nearly two weeks…but this was Mexico!
Ironically St. Augustine, Florida shared common ancestral roots with the conquistador and explorer Juan Ponce de
Leon who explored both places for Spain and to this day the legacy of the family name “Ponce” flourishes in both.
Old Dick Janson and I even went all the way down to Trinidad off the coast of South America to bring back a 75 foot
Desco Marine trawler that was forced to leave there when the new international 200 mile coastal limit for fishing was
enacted.
In the late 1970s Trinidad was still a remote isolated off the beaten path tropical Colonial relic of British Imperialism.
The evidence of “Great Brittan’s” mighty global influence was everywhere but now tarnished and faded like the last
rose of summer. The dock area was in a rough and tough neighborhood where we were instructed never to leave
the vessel unattended, not even for a moment day or night.
It took us two days in Trinidad to provision and make the three vessels we would convoy ready for our long voyage
across the Caribbean Sea and on to Key West.
Caribe beer, canned butter and for the first time we saw Tetra packed milk in boxes that didn’t need refrigeration on
the shelves of grocery stores in Port of Spain, Trinidad were some of the things distinctively different in these out
islands of the southern Caribbean.
The trawler Dick and I were to bring back was nearly worn out when we picked it up in Trinidad. It had been worked
unmercifully hard with minimum maintenance and even the great 3408 Caterpillar engine blew lots of blue smoke
and was just sleepily plodding along like a sway-backed old work horse ready to lie down and sigh its last.
Yes everything on these vessels was worn to the point of near uselessness. The one piece of equipment that made
this trip extremely difficult was the Wood-freeman auto-pilot. Now I can make nearly any mechanical contrivance
function almost no matter how worn or mangled it is. But, try as I could I never in our eleven day passage managed
to make our auto-pilot reliable. As a net result 78 year old Dick Janson and I took four hour shifts for the next eleven
days. On my time off I fixed, lubricated, calibrated and did the navigation and chart work besides the helm duty. Dick
on his time off the helm did the cooking and cleaning and we ate well.
This is where I saw cockroaches. Up to this point in my life I thought that I knew what a cockroach looked like. Well
here I saw the real thing, a literal army of these scurrying critters that were not intimidated by light and big enough to
saddle up and ride on home. This was indeed the real thing and they must have bred an unfathomable quantity of
generations aboard our sea going home of the next eleven days.
We had plenty of time to discuss various topics and when it came to politics Dick was definitely further left than I
happened to be at the time. Dick’s favorite end to any political argument was to say; “OK, have it your way but
remember that I am right!”
With no autopilot on an eleven day trip, four hours on duty and four hours off for the whole eleven day trip back to
Kew West I was amazed to see 78 year old Dick Janson spryly spring off the boat at trips end. I was forty years
younger but the trip had definitely worn me down and taken its toll, I was ready for a quiet and long snooze.
RALPH GOSLINE, delivery boat crewmember, his wife had cancer and was a nurse at Flagler Hospital.
Ralph was in his mid-50s and a closet drinker that couldn’t control his addiction. He squirreled away a sizeable stash
of booze and snuck it aboard so that he could stay perpetually blitzed and buzzed for the entire trip…one trip we
made together was a 28 day trip through the Panama Canal and all the way up to La Paz in Baja, California. Ralph
was basically useless aboard a ship and was not to be trusted even when you were standing there watching him. He
did the galley duty and that at least took a great deal of physical burden of the rest of the crew on our 28 day trip.
So, there you have a very small sample of the social misfits that actually partook in the distribution of St. Augustine’s
enormous shrimp trawler production.
These were the years when St. Augustine was the world’s capital of trawler production.
Desco Marine, the worlds number one builder boasted that; “The sun never sets on a Desco Trawler”.
At that time they were right, but, now the sun has set on Desco Marine…
next chapter
Steve Stefano was one of a number of area people that got sucked into taking part in the actual process of getting
the finished product of St. Augustine’s trawler industry to the end user…the buyer where ever in the world his port
might have been.
Steve was also known as the “Russian” in and around St. Augustine because Steve’s origins were from the Eastern
block of Europe and he had a very thick unmistakable East-block accent.
Stocky smiley Steve had just purchased a neat little shrimp trawler named Little Joe whose diesel engine belched
and blew a steady stream of black smoke distinctively visible from miles away anywhere out in the fishing fleet.
Continuously chomping on his stubby soggy putrid smelling cigar whose acrid smoke relentlessly burned squinting
Steve’s eyes as the “Little Joe” floundered around hopelessly catching nearly nothing.
The Little Joe promptly fell victim to Steve’s unethical, non mechanical and non nautical innovative alterations.
Steve installed an air horn that was powered off the vessels LP gas cylinder. What made matters so bad was the
fact that Steve’s plumbing abilities and attention to detail were lacking in the extreme.
It is hard for me even now to get a mental image of lackadaisical nonchalant Steve showing Jane and I his new
shrimp boat and demonstrating his new air horn installation.
This air horn was connected through a leaky valve that sent raw LP gas fumes flooding into the wheelhouse in a
thick rolling cloud when Steve would proudly give a demonstration of his newly rigged air-horn while chomping squint-
eyed from the acrid smoke dragging on his glowing cigar.
Why he didn’t blow himself up to kingdom-come and take a trip to the moon with that caper I will never understand.
In spite of all of the left handed praise I have previously dished out to Steve he was not totally the village idiot. As a
mater of fact Steve had been trained into a very specialized and demanding profession, Steve just happened to be
Desco Marine’s head pattern maker.
These are the people that make the precision molds that will ultimately reflect the shape of the finished product.
Desco Marine headquartered in St. Augustine was the world’s largest producers of trawlers and they proudly
claimed on their logo that “The Sun Never Sets on a Desco Trawler.”
Desco Marine also boasted at the time to have the world’s largest production model fiberglass vessel with their 75-
footer that displaced 128 tons.
Steve made all of the molds for Desco Marine and they were exquisitely crafted precision works of art.
Steve, “The Russian” had flawlessly made the precision patterns for the world’s largest production fiberglass boats
at the time. At his trade he was right up there with the best of the industry leaders for quality and craftsmanship but
when it came for his own innovations poor Steve was an absolute bungler.
Here is a brief look into Steve’s boating background; between production changes at Desco Marine Steve would
have some slack time on his hands and this is when he got enticed into making some boat deliveries by his next
door neighbor, the retired local shrimp boat owner, Lloyd Wainwright. Lloyd had been a lifelong shrimp boat owner
and operator in St. Augustine and was forced into selling his own shrimp trawler and retirement due to prostrate
cancer.
Old Lloyd knew boats and the sea from years of boating experiences by trial and error but he was an absolute
positive neophyte when it came to navigation with absolutely no schooling or training in chart reading. Captain Lloyd’
s navigational abilities were limited to using a compass and depth sounder and he would then feel his way along the
coast and employ his instincts to do his seat-of the-pants navigation. That was sufficient for most of the boat
deliveries he made for Desco Marine.
Remember these were the days before Loran and Sat-nav, so dead reckoning was how most coastal fishing
seafarers got around back in those days.
Lloyd had no notion of ocean currents, celestial navigation or international rules of the road that included identifying
any navigational lights, ships lights, or right of way rules. Desco Marine wasn’t looking for rocket scientists and if
Lloyd got a little lost or confused; what the heck, diesel fuel was cheap enough back then. Besides the vessels were
all insured and under the worst case scenario if the trawler was lost at sea Desco would get to build yet another, this
time at the expense of the insurance company.
OK, so Steve Stefano gets enticed into a boat delivery with his neighbor Lloyd Wainwright. Well, this isn’t just any
boat delivery; this one would take nearly a month.
The first leg of the trip was to Progresso in Yucatan peninsula of Mexico for fuel. The vessels capacity was 28,000
gallons of diesel fuel, which took three days to load being transported from Merida in a relay team of small trucks.
The trawlers glutinously consumed 40 gallons of fuel per hour.
The next leg of the trip took us on down through the Caribbean to the Panama Canal and next up the Pacific coast
of Central America to Baja California in western Mexico, a 28 day journey. (I was captaining the second vessel.)
I never did get the full explanation of just what happened between Steve and Lloyd on this deliver trip but they never
ever spoke to each other again after this trip was over and they were next door neighbors.
Being out to sea puts heavy strains on volatile personalities and this was just too much for these two.
One possible explanation for the personal alienation was that Lloyd was such a cheap bugger especially with his
crew and loved to put the pinch on their bellies. On Lloyd’s boat the food rations were stingily meager.
His frugality stepped over the line with me when we provisioned at the Panama Canal. Lloyd commandeered all of
the provisions for our vessel and I nearly came to blows with him to get some of it back. As it was we were so short of
provisions that we ran out of food and went the last three days into La Paz, Baja California with nothing to eat.
This was not a moral builder!
Well, at least my crew and I made up for lost time in La Paz with a two day eating extravaganza that the sympathetic
Mexican boat owner sprung for.
That boat trip was Steve’s first boating experience of his life and he evidently liked the sea and boats because
before you knew it Steve went out and bought himself his very own little shrimp trawler.
Jane and I felt sorry for poor Steve with his little shrimp boat because he had invested a lot of money and even
mortgaged his house to buy the boat.
Steve just wasn’t catching any shrimp so we offered to give him some help finding where to put his nets down.
It turned out in the end that helping Steve was a dreadful mistake for us.
To be helpful we told Steve that he could follow us while we were out trawling.
Well, when Steve spotted us he clamped on to our stern like a bloodsucker hungrily hanging on for our blood.
Steve and his black smoke belching Little Joe doggedly tagged along tight on our tail. I swear I could even see his
grimaced face as he chomping down hard on his acrid stinking saliva soaked cigar with its gray smoke curling up
and watering his eyes as he cut us off at every turn while we desperately tried to put some distance between our two
vessels.
It was no wonder that poor Steve wasn’t catching any shrimp; he had absolutely no concept of the relationship of his
boat to his trawl nets or ours either for that matter as we were soon to discover.
Steve had utterly no concept of where our nets were in relation to our boat and we came very close to losing our
whole rig as Steve cut closer and closer to our dearly beloved little Secotan.
(This is our Secotan securely tied off and resting in our front yard adjacent to our dock up Hospital
Creek after a long shrimping season.)
The situation was now approaching the critical point of irreversible damage and I could feel the anxious panicky
sensation of fretful sweat flowing as my heart rate raced and ran wild driven by the adrenalin rush of my unnerved
nervous system.
I am afraid that I must have blackened the airways with my prolific profanity screaming bad language into the VHF
microphone directing Steve to back off and keep his distance. After some years out to sea my sailor’s repertoire of
expletives was well stockpiled and I could lay out a long and protracted string of these off-color adjectives and
expletives without any repetitions.
The rest of the fishing fleet took note of Steve’s behavior and passed along some slide humorous remarks on the
VHF radio like; looks like you are dragging Steve around today…don’t you think you need to cut the man a little
slack…Steve?
So much for helping, Steve was not cut out to be a boater or a shrimper for that matter, but he sure knew how to
build them.
Dick Janson was a tough old witty Swede. Keen minded cynical humored Dick was sharp as a tack, quick as a
wink, sprightly, spry with a spring in his step and almost eighty years old at the time we began making boat deliveries
together.
A word about Dick Janson’s long maritime life;
When Dick was a young man, he left Sweden to escape the military service and took a seaman’s deck job aboard a
British square-rigged freight hauling sailing schooner.
The schooner hauled nearly any class of freight and was known then as a Baltic trader.
Dick told me that he only made one trip aboard that vessel because he was sent aloft high up to the mast-head to
grease the standing rigging with nothing but a boat swain’s chair in a wild horrendously heavy storm driven sea.
After that trip, Dick not only hated the British, he would never again set foot aboard another sailing ship and he
made sure he let everyone he met know his exact sentiments.
Eventually Dick came to America and made his life’s career as a commercial fisherman.
Weather wise, old Dick learned the commercial fishing business from the bottom up along with all of the waterfront
rascals he ran with that made up the backbone of the industry.
Over the years he fished out of Cape May, New Jersey, Cape Canaveral, Key West and St. Augustine, Florida.
I spent many a happy hour out to sea listening to seasoned salty tough old Dick’s recollections of his personal
distinctive sea stories that he loved to tell and embellish upon with a sparkle in his eye that would light up with
laughter.
His life’s experiences at sea would easily fill the pages of a heavy volume and I will only in a few words mention a
couple of those intriguing stories here.
This story took place at Cape Canaveral, Florida when Dick was captaining one of the largest shrimp trawlers afloat
back in those days and it was powered by two 13000 Caterpillar engines.
As a killer hurricane brewed its way up the coast of the sunshine state Captain Dick Jansen was making the best of
a very bad situation.
Anchored off shore near the port at Cape Canaveral Dick had put down his two largest anchors. Then he nailed
down the hatches tightly sealing them with spikes and made his last inspections of the vessel before the impending
storm made venturing out on deck an absolute impossibility.
Dick wasn’t alone out there anchored off this desolate Florida shore. Built like an ox, he and his vessel was one of
the seven trawlers facing the forces of the unrelenting methodically advancing hurricane.
The light dancing mist slanting and swirling out of swiftly passing blue-gray clouds rapidly changed to a heavy
pelting horizontally slanting downpour from un-discernibly blue-black clouds as the storms fury built into a deafening
roar.
The storm blasted uncompromisingly and unmercifully throughout this excruciatingly long black night as resolute
Dick had both of his 13000 Caterpillar engines pressed to their limits and screaming at top RPM to take some of the
stress and strain out of the pressed to their limit anchor lines stretched tighter than bow strings.
There is no rest or sleep under these conditions where the noise level is totally deafening and only the adrenalin
driven anxiety of frightful fear knowing that the screaming shattering unrelenting rage of this demon storm could at
any instant send this ship and its crew catapulting down wind and into a watery grave.
Riding through this hellacious nocturnal torment of towering crashing seas filled with stupendous thunderous storm
driven spindrift would push any sane person’s nerves to the point of near numbness.
The following morning as the bleak weather darkened sun slowly brightened this storm gloomy gray tempest stricken
morning, an exhausted and nerve shattered Dick was shocked by what he first saw.
Dick and his vessel were the only survivors…his six anchored neighbors had been lost during this nightmarish
protracted night of hell to the unforgiving devastation of Mother Nature at her worst.
The huge storm driven seas were so churned and violent that the sea bottom was plowed high up and became
commingled with the wind driven spindrift that deposited nearly eight inches of sea bottom sand and shell upon the
decks of Dick’s nearly defeated storm weary vessel.
It was late that afternoon before the killer storm relented adequately and enough to let beaten down Dick pull up his
anchors and head into port and dock.
When exhausted and physically drained Dick numbed, beaten and drained by the experience finally managed to ply
his way home that night his three young sons all wanted him to take them to the movies and weren’t even interested
in hearing a word of his heroic tale of survival when Dick looked the Grim Reaper squarely in the eye.
The National Fisherman magazine did a feature article about Dick Janson in their yearbook addition which I thought
was a real tribute to a man that had devoted his entire lifetime to the fishing industry. You will find the story in
Volume 4 postscript, chapter 66.
BOAT DELIVERIES;
In the early 1970s Jane and I made our first boat delivery together from St. Augustine to Tampa, Florida aboard a
78 foot wooden trawler built at St. Augustine Trawlers, St. Augustine’s second largest builder.
This was my second trawler delivery. We conveniently had our boat Dursmirg tied at Xynides Boat Yard at the time
plus I was convalescing from a broken shoulder that was nearly healed.
There were two identical boats on this delivery that went together on this trip. Jane and I were aboard one of the
vessels along with Lloyd Wainwright in this winter passage of 1972-1973.
Dick Janson and our friend George Tappin were aboard the second vessel. Because of the vessels draft of nearly
11 feet we had to go all the way down to Key West, up the Northwest Channel and then nearly due north up to
Tampa Bay, our final destination. With a lesser draft vessel it would have been possible to cut across the state on
the Okeechobee canal with its five locks and then cut the trips length in half. Another option with a lesser draft would
have been to cut through the Old Spanish channel near Marathon down in the Florida Keys and that would have
sawed nearly 150 miles off our total trip.
As we followed the east coast of Florida south from St. Augustine all the way to Key West we would transverse the
waters of the Bermuda Triangle with its maritime traffic so thick and congested that I used to joke, “The boats should
be fitted with rear-view mirrors”.
To add to the adventure we had a roly-poly ride in the Straits of Florida that would unrelentingly stand you on your
head in your bunk and next stand you up with each roll and pitch of the vessel.
These brand new vessels were fitted out with the minimum of basic equipment that did not include stabilizers. The
only wheel-house equipment was; compass, depth recorder, and auto-pilot.
In order to give some prospective of the wave size and steepness we encountered rounding the Keys here is what
the wave action did besides washing the decks; it even left flying fish high up on our wheel house top that was more
than twelve feet above the sea. Next we were bewildered by what greeted us as we entered the Gulf of Mexico.
After rounding the Florida Keys to Key West we took the Northwest Channel that led us up into the unmistakable
Coke-bottle green waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
If this had been our only visit to the Gulf of Mexico our impression would have been that it was just a big mill-pond
because it was so inky smooth and calm that we actually could have taken a canoe on this trip. With a gray sky
reflecting into a featureless gray sea the eerie sensation was of our vessel sluggishly floating in outer space. This
eerie sensation was only occasionally broken by some sea bird or playful bottle nose dolphins breaking the ghostly
placidity of the inky lazy slow rolling gentle swells.
I assure you this impression of tranquility was broken numerous times on future crossings of the Coke-bottle green
Gulf of Mexico when true terror was dealt out by Mother Nature who made sure that we fought for our very survival.
All I can say about the above subject is that if you haven’t experienced the true terror of Mother Nature’s sea wrath
you either haven’t been out there or you are just too dense to know you ought to be scared and in that case your
days will be numbered. You will not live long out upon the high seas.
As it was this two and a half day trip turned out to be a real learning experience for both Jane and I. This vessel was
the largest we had ever handled up to this point.
Our navigational skills were put to the test because these vessels were only equipped with a compass, depth
sounder and auto-pilot. We had to use our dead-reckoning skills, plotting our course upon the chart. An accurate
and complete log-book with times of bearings, watches, vessel abnormalities and sightings were recorded and
noted. Our hand bearing compass gave us lines of position but the old timers taught us many tricks not found in the
text books. Reading the water color for depth is obvious but reading the underside of clouds to spot islands, shoals
and distant land were used by day and at night besides the stars we looked for distant faint luminescence that told
of far off cities.
On later trips I can still remember seeing the luminescent glow off shore from distant Merida, Yucatan, Mexico as we
crossed the Gulf of Mexico from Florida. This was our first indication of land ahead after that 500 mile open sea
crossing of the Gulf.
Back in those days very little of the Yucatan peninsula was electrified so even though Merida was 20 miles in from
the coast against the black sky its night lights gave us a true bearing. (Remember these were the days before Loran
was readably available to the boating public…now its day is long past and Loran has been replaced by inexpensive
GPS systems and even made non-sailors into navigators...just as long as the batteries didn’t go dead.)
Here I must interject an interesting twist of fate;
In 1969 Jane and I were married and we took our honeymoon trip, which I had won from a company I was doing
business with to Mexico City and Acapulco. We had a choice of two weeks in Europe or two weeks in the Caribbean.
We chose Mexico because we figured that was one place we would never ever return to.
In 1973 here I was four years later back in Mexico.
Ten years after these boat deliveries Jane and I began our transition that eventually led to our Mexican residence in
Yucatan.
Delivery trips to Mexico;
My first foreign boat deliveries were to Campeche, Mexico on the western side of the Yucatan Peninsula.
The trawler builder, Desco was a subsidiary of Whittaker Corporation that had purchased all the correct politicians
who in turn fashioned and bent all the proper legislation so that the American tax payer would pick up the tab and
underwrite Desco’s somewhat dubious business dealings.
Everybody got screwed in the end except for the fat portly bankers, the bought-off sycophantic suck-up politicians
and of course Desco who sold lots of their very high priced trawlers.
Trips to Mexico were different than other trips because we were fully loaded with cargo both in the hold and on our
decks. The hold would be jam packed with household appliances that wouldn’t like the salt spray. The deck would be
heavy laden have large spools of steel trawl cable, propellers and propeller shafts.
Evidently the Mexican buyers of these brand new state of the art trawlers had some cozy connections with the
Mexican customs agents because all of this merchandise was never inventoried leaving the States or arriving in
Mexico.
(I have always maintained that if the Mexicans wanted to take lessons in corruption they would have to come to
Florida.)
The deck cargo all was extremely heavy, very unwieldy and needed to be loaded and unloaded by crane. The
bronze propellers were five feet in diameter with a five foot pitch and the stainless steel propeller shafts were more
than 20 feet in length and six inches in diameter.
The reason I mention this is that these items were dreadfully heavy and that on more than one occasion we were
caught out in mountainous seas when the lashings holding our deck cargo gave way as the vessel violently pitched
and rolled like a run-away wagon. Of course in almost every incidence these calamities would only occur in the
bleakest dead of night.
This was enough to send us to the bottom when this enormously heavy deck cargo came rolling and sliding from
one side of the pitching and yawing vessel to the other. With a 25 foot beam the cargo had plenty of space to pick
up enough momentum coming down the steeply inclined deck to tear the gunwales out of the leeward side.
Remember that these were fiberglass hulls that could sustain heavy impact but would be subject to tearing at the
deck joints with high torque stress.
The pitch of the vessel as the bow would rise and the fall was determined by the forward speed of our vessel
entering the on coming seas or in the case of a following sea the rate at which the sea swell overtook our vessel
from astern.
In an open seaway with lots of water under our keel this action was normally rhythmical in cadence with cycloidal
waves.
When a wind-storm piped up the sea’s split personality gave you a look at the other side this water world. The waves
went from a gentle rolling rounded cycloidal to sharp jagged white crested fast moving monsters whose tops blow off
in spindrift. This is when the vessel would become hard to steer and the auto-pilot would laboriously and
unceasingly grind and groan, ineffective in holding course.
If the seas crossed the beam of the vessel it would yaw or roll from side to side and depending upon the ballasted
center of gravity which wanted to right itself.
The time of return completing a full side to side roll depended upon the steepness of the sea and the center of
gravity of the vessel. These seas eventually built to the point that they would roll you out of your bunk and pitch your
meal onto the galley floor.
Most often the seas would quarter the vessel causing the craft to both pitch and yaw simultaneously confusing the
autopilot and crew.
These rhythmus motions would be programmed into every seaman’s mind and dictate his every move. One hand for
the ship was always the rule of sea survival.
The number one rule of boating was that the water was supposed to be on the outside, not the inside.
If you can imagine in the middle of the hellish night with huge pounding seas breaking over the decks that sent waist
deep waves of water gushing across the decks while the cargo was ceaselessly loosening its restrainers and
charging around the deck sliding down hill with each roll driven by relentlessly oncoming seas hell bent on sending
your vessel to the bottom.
This is where the term “Salt Water Cowboy” applies. Like riding a bucking bronco and attempting to lasso a stray
bull, here we were. The added feature of being doused and submerged wave after wave while being charged by the
momentum driven, now constantly moving deck cargo that was doing its best to maim, mangle and mutilate us and
destroy the ship made our lasso job a fiendish nightmare. Persistence was imperative because the alternative of
failure meant a watery grave. The real incentive was just in knowing that absolutely no assistance was coming and if
we wanted to greet another sunrise you must prevail. With the utmost of diligence there are no second chances
here.
Dick Janson and I made several trips to Mexico, across the Coke-bottle green waters of the Gulf of Mexico and
down into the Bay of Campeche.
From the port of the ancient walled Spanish colonial city of Campeche we would next have to bus up to the most
beautiful colonial Merida in the state of Yucatan, then known as the “white city”. From Merida we would then fly back
home to Florida.
Docking in Campeche waiting to clear all of the bureaucratic B.S. for ourselves and the vessel was an experience
that few visitors to Mexico would believe existed. Tied to the dock with our yellow quarantine flag flying meant that we
were not allowed to set foot ashore or allow anyone other than the proper officials aboard. To make sure that we
followed these rules the Mexicans stationed half a dozen machine-gun wielding military on the dock that had the
appearance of skipping their grade school classes and would just love to try out their heavy weapons just for kicks.
This was when I knew that I was in a third world country and that I would want to learn to speak some Spanish
because I had discovered that I was a prisoner of language or the lack of it.
We sort of communicated with the young Mexican military guys and they didn’t have any trouble finding a way to
bum cigarettes from my crew.
My first tool in communicating with these youngsters dressed as military guards was this phrase that is a big help in
basic communication; “Como se dise en Español?” or how do you say in Spanish? Then you use hand signals to
elicit the proper response. Soon you will know enough Spanish to get in trouble.
As one of my crew members, Bob Baker, used to say about the Mexican bureaucracy back in those days; “The
Mexican authorities nail one of your feet to the dock when you arrive and then you run around in circles for three
days signing papers before they let you go.” Now that wasn’t too much of a stretch of the imagination. We were
American crew bringing vessels that left the US flying American flags and then three miles off shore we then flew
Mexican flags. To top this all off these vessels carried American mortgages and were being delivered to Mexican
buyers.
These complications were enough to guarantee an already bureaucratic Mexican functionary into his full fledged job
security.
I soon found out in Mexico that the head functionary was the guy with the most rubber stamps on his desk.
How is that for a convoluted bureaucrats dream come true?
With only three flights back to the US each week in those days we had time on our hands in Merida and got to know
some of this lovely “Ciudad Blanca” or White City. This is where I got my very first Spanish lessons and we jokingly
used to say that it was possible to become perfectly fluent in Spanish in only one night in the cantina. The only
problem than was that you couldn’t remember a single word the next day.
A word about Merida; In all of my travels throughout my life up until this time I had never visited any place quite like
this unique one-of-a-kind quiet clean quaint easy going and friendly city.
In 1973 the quiet colonial city of Mérida had 175,000 people and was literally isolated from the rest of the world. Until
1960 when the first paved road from outside the Yucatan Peninsula was built.
The residents of Yucatan do not regard themselves as Mexicans and if they are asked they will reply; “no, we are
Yucatecan”. The Yucatecans considered Mexicans to be primarily foreign people from the city of Mexico or the north
of the country.
In the early 1970s over half of the residents of the state of Yucatan still lived in thatched roof homes called palapas,
as they have for the previous several thousand years. There were only three gasoline stations in the entire city of
Mérida and no stop lights.
Yucatan was a century behind the rest of the world and still had one of the last narrow gauge railroads still in
operation.
The quarter inch thick phone book covered the entire state of Yucatan and the two adjoining states.
Most of the taxis in Mérida were horse drawn carriages called calesas.
There were only three flights a week back to the U.S. in those days so we got to mingle with the natives and being
sailors that meant visiting many of the roughest toughest cantinas in town where the clientele drank to drunken
oblivion.
If you ventured out on the street early in the morning in those days it was common to see borrachos, (drunks) still
passed out on the pavement where they had conked out the previous night.
On one of our delivery trips we visited a cantina the night before we were to fly out and it was packed with very
friendly drunks that insisted that we all drink together as they called us “amigos”. They ordered several bottles of
booze delivered to their table and my crew and I drank beer.
When it was time for my crew and I to take our departure the waiter presented us with the tab for the entire group.
We of course protested and refused to pick up the tab for our newly acquired “amigos”.
The next morning when we left our hotel headed for the airport in our taxi we passed through the central plaza on
the way.
Wow! There in a steel cage made of stout steel bars perched up upon the back of a flatbed truck were our “amigos”
from the night before obviously on their way to jail and they weren’t even there yet.
Somehow we got the impression that the Mexican justice system was going to be heavy handed, and I learned a
very important lesson…don’t ever get in trouble in Mexico!
Our trips became extended because of our return home flight and coordinating our transportation. From St.
Augustine to Campeche bouncing through the briny sea at ten and an half knots it took about five days depending
upon the weather and sea conditions. Then next contending with the Mexican bureaucrats, the airplane connections
and the logistics in between turned our five day delivery trip into nearly two weeks…but this was Mexico!
Ironically St. Augustine, Florida shared common ancestral roots with the conquistador and explorer Juan Ponce de
Leon who explored both places for Spain and to this day the legacy of the family name “Ponce” flourishes in both.
Old Dick Janson and I even went all the way down to Trinidad off the coast of South America to bring back a 75 foot
Desco Marine trawler that was forced to leave there when the new international 200 mile coastal limit for fishing was
enacted.
In the late 1970s Trinidad was still a remote isolated off the beaten path tropical Colonial relic of British Imperialism.
The evidence of “Great Brittan’s” mighty global influence was everywhere but now tarnished and faded like the last
rose of summer. The dock area was in a rough and tough neighborhood where we were instructed never to leave
the vessel unattended, not even for a moment day or night.
It took us two days in Trinidad to provision and make the three vessels we would convoy ready for our long voyage
across the Caribbean Sea and on to Key West.
Caribe beer, canned butter and for the first time we saw Tetra packed milk in boxes that didn’t need refrigeration on
the shelves of grocery stores in Port of Spain, Trinidad were some of the things distinctively different in these out
islands of the southern Caribbean.
The trawler Dick and I were to bring back was nearly worn out when we picked it up in Trinidad. It had been worked
unmercifully hard with minimum maintenance and even the great 3408 Caterpillar engine blew lots of blue smoke
and was just sleepily plodding along like a sway-backed old work horse ready to lie down and sigh its last.
Yes everything on these vessels was worn to the point of near uselessness. The one piece of equipment that made
this trip extremely difficult was the Wood-freeman auto-pilot. Now I can make nearly any mechanical contrivance
function almost no matter how worn or mangled it is. But, try as I could I never in our eleven day passage managed
to make our auto-pilot reliable. As a net result 78 year old Dick Janson and I took four hour shifts for the next eleven
days. On my time off I fixed, lubricated, calibrated and did the navigation and chart work besides the helm duty. Dick
on his time off the helm did the cooking and cleaning and we ate well.
This is where I saw cockroaches. Up to this point in my life I thought that I knew what a cockroach looked like. Well
here I saw the real thing, a literal army of these scurrying critters that were not intimidated by light and big enough to
saddle up and ride on home. This was indeed the real thing and they must have bred an unfathomable quantity of
generations aboard our sea going home of the next eleven days.
We had plenty of time to discuss various topics and when it came to politics Dick was definitely further left than I
happened to be at the time. Dick’s favorite end to any political argument was to say; “OK, have it your way but
remember that I am right!”
With no autopilot on an eleven day trip, four hours on duty and four hours off for the whole eleven day trip back to
Kew West I was amazed to see 78 year old Dick Janson spryly spring off the boat at trips end. I was forty years
younger but the trip had definitely worn me down and taken its toll, I was ready for a quiet and long snooze.
RALPH GOSLINE, delivery boat crewmember, his wife had cancer and was a nurse at Flagler Hospital.
Ralph was in his mid-50s and a closet drinker that couldn’t control his addiction. He squirreled away a sizeable stash
of booze and snuck it aboard so that he could stay perpetually blitzed and buzzed for the entire trip…one trip we
made together was a 28 day trip through the Panama Canal and all the way up to La Paz in Baja, California. Ralph
was basically useless aboard a ship and was not to be trusted even when you were standing there watching him. He
did the galley duty and that at least took a great deal of physical burden of the rest of the crew on our 28 day trip.
So, there you have a very small sample of the social misfits that actually partook in the distribution of St. Augustine’s
enormous shrimp trawler production.
These were the years when St. Augustine was the world’s capital of trawler production.
Desco Marine, the worlds number one builder boasted that; “The sun never sets on a Desco Trawler”.
At that time they were right, but, now the sun has set on Desco Marine…
next chapter
