Tuesday, April 3, 2012

MENHADEN FISH STORY and POST SCRIPT TO STORY

FISH IN THE HOLD
Growing up in Southport NC in 1935
                               
STORY ABOUT A 12 YEAR OLD BOY’S FISHING TRIP TO EARN MONEY TO TAKE HIS GIRL FRIEND WILMA TO THE MOTION PICTURE SHOW
 
 
This is a Menhaden fishing boat with purse boats and net being hauled in. This is a picture of a modern boat, with power purse boats with net being hauled in with machinery. All of this is different from the story I want to tell about the mid 1930 era.Then the purse boats had no power except oars, and the nets were pulled in by hand.

 
How lucky can a 12 year old boy, growing up in Southport be? I probably did not think so at the time, but looking back those were wonderful days.

“Don’t forget to set the alarm clock” I was thinking because I have to be down on the waterfront before daylight.” Hope the weather is good, but I know it will be hot. It always is in July. I have not decided who I will go fishing with. I could go with Doonie Watts to the shoals off from Ball Head Island blue fishing, with Merritt Moore shrimping, or with Captain John Erickson (my grandmother’s nephew) on the menhaden boat John Anderson. I had better get to sleep because I can decide that in the morning.

Boy, it is hot, even before the sun comes up. I go to the waterfront but can’t find Doonie. He probably isn’t going out today. I believe I will pass up the shrimp boat because the ocean is rough and being so hot the odor when they are culling the shrimp out of the trash fish is so strong I am not sure my stomach can take it. My only option left is going menhaden fishing with Capt. John, so I had better hurry before he leaves the dock. I need to find about a dozen bluefish ( this is a fish most people in Southport like because they say it tastes like a fish, unlike a flounder which they say has very little taste at all) that are feeding in the menhaden schools. Twelve will probably earn me about 75 cents if I am lucky, plenty to take Wilma to the Amuzu Picture Show.

 It is about 10 o’clock now and fishing has been good. We have about 100,000 fish in the hold but have not seen any blues and I am getting worried. The fish are dipped out of the net by something like a crab net. It holds about 3000 fish and the bottom will open up so the fish can fall in the hold. The loaded net came over the hold and the bottom opened, and as the fish fell I saw probably 10 or 12 big blues on top of all the other fish. Now a 12 year old kid’s trouble begins. I am so anxious to get all the blues that I can before the next net full drops on top of them I jump feet first on top of those fish, not realizing that in the summer they are soft and very slimy. As my feet hit the fish I knew I was in deep trouble because I started to sink. The more I kicked the deeper I sank in the fish. I screamed as I was now up to my arm pits in those slimy fish and still sinking. The only thing keeping me from going out of sight was my outstretched arms.
These are the slimy fish I almost sank out
of sight when I jumped in to retrive blue fish
to earn enough money to take Wilma to the
motion picture show.
 

 At that moment an old gentleman looked down in the hold and started laughing. He called out “Capt. John, Capt John you had better come and get your young man out of these fish before he goes out of sight”. I screamed louder, and by now there were quite a few of the crew staring down and laughing. I could not find one thing funny. In a couple of minutes they emptied the full bale net back in the net in the water and the empty net was lowered for me. Capt John said “grab the net”, as if I needed someone to tell me this. When I grabbed the net I was sure they would need a hack saw to get my fingers loose. I think back now, and I can’t remember one time in all of the D day landings that my Ship the LST 775 made in the retaking of the Philippines when I was more frightened than I was at this moment.
Let me tell you there was one mad man, Capt John. He called out to me to go to his room, not inside but outside and stay there until we arrived back in Southport. By this time the slime had dried and I smelled awful. I was in no mood to look for anymore fish.

When we arrived off from the dock in Southport the crew gets in the purse boats and row to the dock, while the Anderson proceeds on to the factory to unload. The custom is that when the boat is abreast the Garrison flag pole they use their  horn to signify how many fish they have in the hold. The signal is 3 Long blasts followed by short ones to indicate how many thousands they had caught. The Anderson signaled 200,000. At this point I did not care how many were aboard because my day had been ruined. I was covered with dried slime; I smelled like a skunk, had no bluefish, and no money for the motion picture show with Wilma. Have you ever had a really bad day?

POST SCRIP TO FISH IN THE HOLD

I know you must feel the crew, catching 200,000 fish in a day must make a lot of money, so let me explain about this fish. A menhaden is very oily, strong tasting, and is used for fertilizer and the oil has many uses.One thing it is not good for and that is to eat.There was a story of a group of drunk men that went to the beach to set a net to catch Spots( a small good tasting fish) and cook on the beach, but the only fish they caught were menhaden. One very drunk, hungry man in the group said he had heard that any fish that swims in the ocean was eatable, so they cooked and ate.The end results(no pun intended),one man said he had diarrhea for a full week after eating those damn menhaden.


Back to the pay for catching that many fish. There are 20 men in the crew and the boat is paid 75cents ( that is correct, cents not dollars ) per 1000 fish. This is divided, the captain receives 12 cents, Mate 6, engineer 6 and the crew's share is 3 cents each, so for a full days work they earned 6 dollars. Remember this is 1936, but would you want to go fishing with them ? However that doesn't sound so bad when I remember 5 years later I went on active duty in the navy in Nov.1940 and the pay was $21.00 a month.I think that figures out to 70 cent a day, so maybe fishing was not such a bad deal after all.

I am really a part of this whole story. My father was at one time mate on one of these boats and if he had been on the Anderson with us, my mother would have made that $12.00 go a long way. We never had much, but were never in need of anything that we really had to have.I loved growing up in Southport because of all the freedom you had and hated to move, but in my freshman year in High School my father accepted a position of captain of an Army boat stationed at Ft.Moultrie SC. We moved to Sullivan's Island SC and I attended and graduated from Charleston High School.  Even though I hated the move, I  think if I had remained in Southport I would not have had all the opportunities that were later made available to me. However that is another story.

1 comments:

Anonymous

Thank you for this story!
Merritt Moore was my grandpa.

Thank you