My first real boat job was working as a deckhand on a “head boat” out of Grand Lagoon, down in Panama City Fla. I don’t know why they call them head boats, but the “Gulf Pride” was sixty feet or so, and took 20 or 30 paying passengers bottom fishing out over the horizon in the gulf. We would leave the dock about seven a.m. My job was to stock all the coolers with block ice, drinks, and bait, rig up all the electric reels, cut bait on the way out, set and weigh the anchor, help those who needed it, gaff the fish when they caught them, then string them up and store them in the fish box. On the way in I would hang them up for display all-around the wheelhouse so the gaggle of summer tourists waiting at the dock would all gasp and take pictures. We were a floating billboard for the fishing business, and the fleet owners made a real production out of it. There was a guy there at the dock with a microphone, as we were tying up. He would comment on the boat and the skipper and the mate and the fish, “… a real nice grouper there folks… prob’ly thirty pounds, looks like they found a school of amberjacks too… mmmm delicious when they are fresh… ooo and look at that big PENsacola Red snapper… it JUST don’t get any better than this, folks. Y’all better c’mon and sign up …we still have a few slots left for tomorrah!”
After we unloaded all the fish, gear, and seasick tourists, washed down and took on fuel and water, I was allowed as part of my pay to carry whatever fish anyone left behind down to the market and sell them to the ladies there. Usually that was trigger fish, which, although good eating, back then was considered a trash fish. Folks would want to keep them just the same, until we got ashore and they realized what a pain they were to clean and how little meat they had on them- so then they would give them to me. I usually wound up with a wheelbarrow load at the end of every trip. They fetched Five cents a pound. Those women filleted them there under a tin shed, and re sold them as “ocean perch” to commercial packers. So, the humble Triggerfish eventually became the “Whaler”- a fish sandwich at Hardees.
The mate’s name was “Buster”. A cranky, tobacco stained old salt, with no shirt no shoes and no teeth. He had one crooked old pair of blue jeans that he wore every day I ever saw him, held up by a manilla rope tied into a square knot. A homeade knife was kept in a sheath, made of a piece of fire hose looped onto this “belt”. As far as anyone knew that was all the property he had to his name. Except for his crooked glasses, which were always fogged up and hung across his crooked grey head, which sat upon his crooked shoulders, made so by a collapsed lung, which had been perforated by shrapnel in the war in the Pacific. His skin was a riddle of tattoos browned by the sun, that looked something like an overcooked blueberry cobbler. He smoked pall malls and drank warm beer more or less constantly. I never saw him eat anything. He slept in a little place right there at the “curve” next to Capt Andersons’ restaurant. I can still see him standing in the road with his knife out, “directing traffic” as he zig zagged towards his shack. Buster didn’t do too well on the “hill”, but was at home in a seaway; perfectly tuned to the intricate rhythms of nature. Like a gyroscope he kept true to the vertical axis, while everything and everyone else rolled and pitched around the deck. Buster stashed his beer in the overhead life jacket bins, and was always circling the deck surveying and counting his supply, to the alarm of some of the guests, who sometimes thought he was counting the life jackets.
Technically, it was forbidden for any of the boat hands to drink on board, but Captain Cisco, who understood the intricacies of fuel curves and power consumption, made a quiet exception in the case of his mate, who was not expendable. Buster simply couldn’t function without his own special fuel. Cisco was concerned with only two things: getting the old girl back home, and having more fish hanging off the eyebrow than any of the other dozen or so competitors of the fleet. All of his policies were simply a calculation towards those ends.
Cisco was the first man I ever saw that wore a diamond ring. I didn’t know men did that. I grew up in the pine woods of Georgia, where men only wore senior rings or maybe wedding bands. But it somehow suited him. Standing at the wheel in his kakis and canvas shoes, the ring gave him a touch of elegance, that somehow enhanced his natural gravitas. I would watch him twirl the dials on the old loran-a, or study the way he used the throttle and gears to position the boat. Like Buster, Cisco was at one with the machine that they both depended on to stay alive. He was a quiet spoken practical man, and he liked me, mainly because I showed up on time just before sunup, every day. He was always there first with a pot of coffee.
The cook, “Sarge”, was a white haired yankee who hated cooking. He took the job so he could “dead head”- fish for nothing and sell his catch when we got in. He had a special electric commercial reel we called the “one armed bandit”. It had a dozen or so baited hooks set vertically with three way swivels on a long wire leader, carried down by an old window sash weight. He would sell his catch, usually snapper and grouper, at the dock. Sometimes he would fillet up a trigger fish or amberjack, and make fish sandwiches for the crew. That lunch made it almost worth showing up every morning! Sarge made a few bucks off the grill, but we (Buster Sarge and I) had an unspoken objective- to make as many of the tourists as seasick as possible, so they would go inside and lay down and not bother us. Then, we could get more fishing done ourselves. To this end, we had the bait cutting table set up right next to the galley. The aroma of diesel fumes, bacon and eggs, and squid thawing in the summer heat usually did the trick, sometimes before we even got outside the inlet.
Now and then, someone would hook into a shark. Usually a Bull or a Hammerhead. The tourists, who were often first timers, couldn’t recognize the bite. They would feel a tug, and start reeling in furiously, as the shark made a lazy circle around the boat gathering up everyone else’s gear. Then as each fisherman began to feel something they would reel theirs in too. The result was a huge wad of 20 oz leads, leaders and hooks in a ball under the boats keel. The only thing to do was to go around and cut everybody’s line on one side of the boat and deck the whole mess. It usually took an hour or so to sort it all out. Nowadays people fish for sharks for sport. We considered them a huge nuisance.
The thing I remember most of the whole party fishing boat experience was the colors. What a treat it is to peer down into the blue, and watch as a tiny caricature of a fish gradually grows in shape as it nears the surface, taking on pigmentation when it meets the sun for the first time, flashing the most vibrant shades of red, green or silver. We caught “Beeliners”, or Vermillion Snapper, Goggle eye, red and black (Gag) Grouper, Red Snapper, Amberjacks and Triggers. My favorite was the Queen Trigger (above photo), which unlike her common grey cousin, is a flamboyant neon version.
I lasted a couple of months. One morning I slept late, which is a sin among those who depend on each other. But I was a harum sacrum nineteen year old with other priorities. I just slid on out of town, without notice, chasing after my next adventure. When the great reckoning day comes, and my case comes up, I expect to be penalized for that. It was years later before I realized how much I really owed those folks, and how much they had taught me.
