Orion Magazine - March/April 2009

THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT l 3
BUCKING A
STIFF EBB TIDE
An old-school shrimper makes it pay, just barely
text and photographs by
ROGER PINCKNEY

She came a-rattling upriver, a battered old trawler bucking a sti= ebb tide. She was plywood and > ber-glass but there was an angular beauty about her. Crude blue letters on the prow bore her name: PIF. Her nets were doubled to the outriggers and tied clear of the water, like a tall woman hitches a long dress when she walks barefoot in the rain.

Captain Billy was at the wheel. I cannot tell you of a time when I did not know him. Back in high school we both wanted to run o= shrimping. I >gured to go to college >rst, then come back and quote

Shakespeare while I pulled the nets, you know, “full fathom >ve” and all that. Billy reckoned to get right to it. He did but I got sidetracked. I was blessed to run boats from the Bahamas to Hudson Bay, but I never pulled a net. Forty-odd years later, standing on the end of that dock waiting for the PIF, I was >xing to get my chance.

Billy nudged the dock and held the

boat against the great suck of seabound water while I clambered aboard. “You know Calibogue Sound good as anybody,” he said as we swung downriver again. “Take us on out.”

And so I found myself at the wheel of the PIF.

Paid In Full. No mortgage on this boat, a rare thing these days. Ain’t much to mortgage anyway, a seepy hull old enough to vote with a GMC diesel that could draw Social Security. Winches and chains and sprockets to give an OSHA man the heebies, an oily bilge to give an EPA man the hives. There was a dog on

board, Prawn Boy, a yellow Lab. And then there was the lovely Miss Lizzie, Billy’s deckhand, a striker they call them on a shrimp boat. Lizzie had a journalism degree from Carolina, but worked the food and beverage trade for the money. Then she took up with Captain Billy. Always plenty to eat, an occasional beverage, but very little money. Didn’t seem to matter that much. They love what they do. So does the dog.

You might see a trawler working the horizon, laying a >ne pencil mark of smoke along the edge of the world, and you might

>gure the crew is hunkered over beer and bottle-cap checkers. But there’s no wasted time on a trawler, no wasted moves, either. Captain Billy went aft to fret over the rigging while I held the wheel. Down Calibogue to rolling blue water where the sea buoys bobbed red and green and faithful, down among wheeling birds and rolling dolphin and farther to where distant islands lay like green smudges beyond an ocean of hammered steel.

A trawl net is like a long sock. There

are chains to keep it down, ?oats to keep it up, doors to keep it open. PIF pulls two thirty-footers. Then there is the try-net, a ten-footer Billy keeps busy to assay what the bigger nets are catching. Pull it every half-hour and it will tell you what you need to know. Billy has some sort of a formula, x number of shrimp in y minutes make a drag worthwhile. Every time the try-net comes aboard, Prawn Boy pads astern to second the opinion.