Shrimp Boat Part 2 of 3

To read Part 1

I ate the one bag of miniature Snickers in our first three days on board. As our only supply of sugar and 27 days to go, this would become an issue.

Rigmaster: You know this time of the year is bad for sharks. Yep, one of the boats went out last month and had a man go overboard when the sharks were out, and by the time they got turned around there wasn’t even so much as a drop of blood in the water. Not a shred of him to be seen.

I thought his story was total bullshit meant to scare rookies and give the old timers a rise. I wasn’t here for any “Jaws” story. I just shrugged my shoulders and went back to sorting. He was probably just sore there wasn’t any more snickers.

After the morning haul, packing the shrimp and having breakfast Captain Joe would go to his private quarters and the rigmaster would come back to our bunk area and they’d go to sleep. I’d go out to the back deck, strip down to my shorts and start working out and shadow boxing. It was great the rhythm of the ocean the wind, the seagulls. To a 19 year old whose total experience of the finer things in life was eating caviar once this was like being paid to travel on a cruise ship. The food was paid for, and someone else was cooking it.

The rigmaster made sure we ate like kings but there was a rub to his cooking. Every meal we had and I mean every meal, from pancakes to steak we had beans. I thought it was peculiar, but after spending two weeks with him I thought everything he did was peculiar. From the facial ticks to the head snaps and the entire body jiggle. It was like there was no central command.

Captain Joe was having none of it. “ASSHOLE! When I said I liked beans I didn’t mean I wanted them with every Goddamned meal I was ever going to eat again in my fucking life.”

“I was just trying to do what you wanted. You said you liked beans.” The rigmaster replied meekly.

“Well you missed doing it by the size of your girlfriends coocher. I swear you suffer from terminal asshole-ism. I’ve been to two county fairs and goat fucking contest and if this don’t beat all.”

Captain Joe started going through the cabinets cursing and making oaths about what he would do if he had to eat another serving of beans. He found a can in the cupboard and promptly threw it out the window over the sink. The cursing continued, leveling personal insults at the rigmaster now, calling his manhood and his ability to perform into question. He found another can of beans and stepped out onto the back deck and heaved it into the deep. He was using compound refractor anatomical profanity now with phrases like ‘dicknose’. There was an endless list of synonyms and foreign term that I had not heard before nor since. If I had known this was going to be the greatest display of profanity in my life I would have taken notes instead of laughing.

The rigmaster sat there sullen faced on his bunk, resigned to the consequence of his best intentions. Captain Joe slowly lost steam and wound down after not finding any more of the illicit cans and went to his quarters. The rigmaster sat there for a minute taking it all in and then slowly made his way to the kitchen to straighten out the cupboards. As he did so he started to stand more erect, square his shoulder and puff his chest out. He pulled out three cans of beans and looked at me to say, “I’ll show him. Beans is the only thing I’m fixing tonight.”
-----
Two days later I was sorting shrimp in the middle of the night. The back deck is lit up like a football field. There wasn’t  the slightest breeze, and the gulf was as calm as a lake at dawn. The rigmaster was scuttling the remains of my sorting overboards. He leaned over the side and cried, “WE GOT SHARKS!”

I jumped and ran to the side of the boat looked  and didn’t see anything.  How disappointing. I thought he meant sharks. I slumped my shoulders and was turning around to go back to my box stool and sorting when the rigmaster tapped me on the shoulder and pointed aft to all the scuttled chum. Behind the boat the water was churning. Not just the normal wash from the prop or the wake from the hull. It was alive and boiling. It was a surreally familiar scene, like feeding time at a fish farm or an ornamental fish pond, but magnified. There were sharks everywhere, hundreds. They were so thick I thought I could climb out of the boat and walk across the top of them. As the rigmaster would scuttle more chum, the chaos would crescendo and a shark would break the surface and momentarily be suspended above the water before the mass would part and he’d return to the school.

The rig master looked at me with his goofy grin and said, “I told you we had sharks.”

Boy howdy did we. After seeing “Jaws” and hearing about 25-30 foot sharks, a story about an 8-10

Hoss

foot shark just doesn’t impress me, but as the rig master made his remark a shark left the pack and swam up to the side of the boat where we were standing. He was enormous, he could rip my leg off with one bite, he was deadly. He was 10 feet long. My curiosity satisfied, the railing on the ship felt suddenly very low. I immediately sat down and crab crawled back to mid deck.

Shrimp Boat Part 1 of 3

The boat was rocking. Not violently, just three to four foot swells enough to let you know you we’re in open water. The rigmaster was working the winch, trying to lower the swollen net on the captain's command. The pulley holding the net was 30 feet in the air and the 3,000 pound net was swinging four feet above the deck. First the net would swing port several feet over the railing and then starboard. While Captain Joe was shouting instruction and batting at the net like it was a pinata. I reached out and grabbed the net to wrestle it into the middle of the deck. I was lucky it didn’t catapult me overboard or break my legs on the knee high rail. It just dragged me around the deck like a kid clinging to his dad’s leg.

Captain Joe yelled at me from the other side of the net, “Hoss, what the hell are you doing? I know you’re tough but it’s going to thrash your ass!”

I let go.

A few moments later Captain yelled, “Now!”

The rig master dropped the net and it landed dead center of the deck. Captain pulled the line that held the net shut, and the rig master hoisted it back up to release the haul. It covered the entire deck almost 3 feet deep in shrimp, fish of every kind, crabs, lobsters, stingrays and the occasional dead shark. I started separating.

The Captain stood by and watched me start the messy job. The shrimp would go into a laundry basket and everything else was pushed to the side to be scuttled overboard. The rig master had left the winch and was standing on the other side of the deck looking at the pile and fiddling with the crabs.

“ASSHOLE!” I looked up.

Captain: Not you, Hoss. I wanted Asshole.

Calling me Hoss was like calling a fat man Slim or Tiny. At 5’11” and 140 pounds there was hardly enough to me keep from being washed away.

Captain: Asshole, are you going to drop the net or am I going to have to come over there and do your job, too?

Asshole/Rigmaster was waving his gangly arms around his head like the persecuted fool he was, trying to deflect the criticism.

“Sheez, I’m gonna drop the nets. I was just checking the last haul,” The Rigmaster said.

Captain Joe turned back to me, “You don’t say much do you, Hoss?”

I shook my head no.

“Well a man’s got a right to keep to himself.”

This was two weeks into the tour. Long enough for everyone to settle into their roles and be irritable. I had been in Port Aransas, Texas for a year and a half as an aspiring kick boxer. I hired onto a shrimp boat because international waters looked inviting compared to the inside of a cell and by the time I got back I’d be able to clear up any legal misunderstandings .
-----
The rigmaster had the unenviable moniker of “Asshole.” Unfortunately, it was the only name I knew. Rigmaster is the most labor intensive job on the boat. His job was everything the Captain didn’t want to and everything I didn’t know how to do. From buying all the supplies, cooking, dropping & pulling the nets, piloting when the captain felt like sleeping, shoveling ice and packing shrimp below deck, he was the boats girl Friday. He had led a hard life, with a map of the world in the lines of his face. Officially I was listed as the boats sole rig master and deck hand. Asshole couldn’t pass the physical. He was skinny as a rail, but he’d had a heart attack last year and hadn’t been able to get back on a boat until Captain Joe took him on this tour.

Captain Joe hired me despite my lack of experience so he could get Asshole on the boat. When he said he’d take me he set a few ground rules.

“One, don’t get sea sick on me. If you get sick when your sorry, never-been-to-sea ass hits the open water, I’m turning right around and dropping your ass off. You’re as useless as a bible in a whorehouse if you’re going to be sick the whole time. Two, put ALL the shrimp in the basket. Not just the big ones and think it’s good enough. Cause it ain’t. I don’t need no half-ass, whiny bullshit. We get paid by the pound, so the shrimp go in the basket. Three, don’t ask me what type each little fishy is, or I’ll throw your ass overboard. There are only two fish you need to know about, and I’ll show you both of them. The scorpion fish will paralyze half your body and make you puke and die if you end of having some kind of allergic reaction. You ain’t allergic to anything are you?”

I shook my head no.

“Good. Don’t need you dying on me, neither. We need the ice to pack the shrimp, not your dead ass. Can you handle the detail?”

“I can.” those would be the last two words I spoke for over two months. He never did tell me about the second fish.