Now the 39th anniversary of the wreck of the M/V Clay Hollister.
I thought I might write a little about the Texas shrimping experience of the mid '80s. I no longer have any connection to the industry but I know there has been great change on the Gulf coast. My boat, the Clay Hollister was based out of Conn Brown Harbor in Aransas Pass, Texas. It was a working harbor in those days with two “fish houses”, i.e. shrimp buying and processing plants and multiple fleets and independent operators. The biggest fleet and fish house was Gulf King, but the best boats were the “Miss Barbara” fleet. The Clay Hollister was the second boat in a two boat fleet owned by a Croatian fishing family. Conn Brown Harbor now has only a couple of boats and is destined to be the location of luxury condos.
There were two basic kinds of shrimping: bay shrimping and Gulf shrimping. Bay boats are small and ply the bay every morning and usually go back home at night. Gulf boats can work anywhere from in sight of the beach to hundreds of miles away from shore. A Gulf boat may stay out as short a time as two days or as long as forty days, depending on the season and specific location of the “bottom” one is fishing. Among the Gulf boats, most have hulls made of steel, but there were some with wooden hulls, which was the case with the Clay Hollister. The biggest distinction though, was ice boat or freezer boat. There are two ways to keep the shrimp: frozen in plastic bags, or carefully packed in ice in bins from two feet to six feet tall. In the '80s, it was about 50-50, but the trend towards freezer boats was already established. My boat was one of the last wooden hull, ice boats built in Texas.
One of the things that was remarkable about the whole fleet was the level of technology in the wheelhouse. I had spent some time aboard big, modern oilfield supply boats and the rickety shrimp boats had much better tech. They needed it. The radar was about the same as the supply boat, and both used Loran to navigate, but the shrimpers had advanced depth finders and many, including us, had “plotters” that visually tracked your “drag” across and beside known hazards and across familiar bottom. The plotter was exactly like the pen plotters in engineering departments in those years. It used Loran inputs to move the pen. The Skipper or Rig Man (first mate) would use the boat’s “Hang Book” to mark the coordinates of know “hangs” or dangerous shell bottoms, then as you drag the nets, you can visually avoid the hangs on the plotter and “get by” that night. The dominating sound in the wheelhouse was radios. So many radios. Not the music kind. Everybody talks on the radios, but smart ones mainly listen. On the various bands, one might be following three or four conversations simultaneously trying to find out who is catching shrimp where. You have to work with some other boats, or you can get shut out if you make a bad guess on which bottom to drag, but you can’t go blabbing to everyone if you catching shrimp or everybody will come and ruin it. We worked closely with the boat owners other boat and a couple of other friends. We communicated using Croatian words as code. Everybody had there own code, the Cajuns, the Vietnamese, the fucking crazy Floridians who would come when the season opened on the Texas coast. We, along with everybody else, tried to crack everybody’s code and find out where the shrimp were. Most of the year, you drag at night with the Skipper taking first shift and the Rig Man taking second. Deck Hands (known as “Headers” on a shrimp boat) get to sleep all night.
If you’ve read this far, thanks! If there’s any interest, I’ll add some more later.
