I was leaning over the side of the Pollyanna, throwing up into the Gulf of Mexico. For two years, I was having adventures logging in Alaska and now, at the opposite end of the continent, shrimping in Florida. But today, I was having seasickness. Captain Larry Cooper walked to where I had been lying for hours in the boat’s stern to tell me to get up and eat something. Saltine crackers would settle my stomach. So I weakly followed him on wobbly legs into the galley. I would eventually find my sea legs and the adventures I hoped for, as well as some I couldn’t anticipate.
The Pollyanna was a seventy-two-foot “otter trawler” that seemed huge to me while docked in the harbor of Key West. But once it motored to the shrimping area halfway between Florida and Cuba, the boat seemed like a tiny refuge in a watery world. I learned the meaning of the earth’s surface being seventy percent water. It seemed I could see most of it from that small boat. I also learned a new definition of self-sufficiency on those waters because any supplies or help were now very far away.
Besides being a “land lubber,” I liked sleeping when it got dark. So I was quite surprised to learn that pink shrimp are caught at night. We worked under artificial lighting on the stern’s work deck, picking shrimp out of the menagerie of ocean life from the sea floor. The Pollyanna pulled an “otter trawl” net from each of her two outriggers. These funnel-shaped nets were designed to drag the ocean bottom. Two large “doors” acted like underwater kites to spread the funnel mouth open and down, while a “tickler” chain scraping the ocean’s floor made bottom dwellers jump up to be scooped in the netting. All those creatures were swept into the nets’ tapered ends called “tail bags.” Three times a night, each tail bag was brought on board to be emptied onto the work deck. Anything that wasn’t shrimp was shoveled overboard back into the sea.
Shrimp are found in certain areas in the sea, so commercial harvesting operations congregate where a profitable catch can be made. These fleets of lighted boats are visible from space and can be seen in nighttime satellite pictures where they appear as concentrations of bright dots in an otherwise dark ocean. The lights also attract porpoises or sharks that have learned to follow the boats, feeding on the “bycatch” crews shovel overboard after sorting for shrimp. Bycatch consists of unwanted fish, octopus, crabs, sponges, sea horses, sea snakes, and many other creatures. Schools of porpoise or sharks follow the boats, feeding on the bycatch and swimming eerily in and out of the lighted waters behind each boat.
It was downright creepy for me to watch this nighttime feeding frenzy. When I asked the captain why no one wore life jackets, he simply replied, “Have you looked over the stern?” Staying on the boat was the priority.
Porpoises were playful. The captain drew my attention to small schools that played with the boat in the daytime as we motored to and from shrimping areas. I was awestruck as the sea mammals swam back and forth in front of the boat’s bow. The powerful trawler was pushed by a twelve-cylinder diesel engine turning a five-foot bronze propeller, creating a four-foot wake. But the athletic porpoise swam within a few feet in front of the driving boat. Contact would have been fatal, yet they repeatedly played.
Sharks following the boats were a different matter. Play didn’t seem to be their priority. That was demonstrated one night when we brought a tail bag onboard. I was lifting the bulging net with the aid of a cathead winch, a spinning steel drum with the lifting rope wrapped around it. I could easily control the lift by pressure on the rope. Little Jimmy, the first mate, was inspecting a large moving bulge in what should have been a motionless conglomeration of catch. Jimmy kept lifting the nylon fringe called “chaffing gear” that protected a heavy tail bag from the abrasive sea bottom, but was now obstructing the view of what was moving in the tail bag. He kept shaking his head negatively. Finally, Captain Cooper told him to get the gun. I naively thought, “The gun?” Jimmy returned to hand a large revolver to the captain, who was standing with me behind the pin rail, a steel barrier where various ropes of the ship’s rigging could be tied off. Jimmy returned to the hanging, writhing tail bag. He grasped the rope that, when pulled, would empty the contents onto the work deck. He positioned himself like a track star in the starting blocks. The captain said okay, and Jimmy took off running the full length of the boat away from the spilling contents.
The catch cascaded onto the boat’s wooden deck in a wet slurry containing a very much alive ten-foot shark. With my mouth agape, I watched it thrash, crash, and slide around the entire work area. It would push itself off the three-foot-high walls that defined the back of the boat. It kept biting at whatever or nothing at all. During this unexpected chaos, the captain beside me was firing his very big, very loud handgun at the shark’s head. Repeatedly. I could see blood splatter and not a few wood chips, too. I foolishly feared he might sink the boat. Pretty quickly, the gun was empty and the shark less lively. Captain Cooper told me and the two other crew peering around the cabin to go to the galley for coffee and a snack because it takes time for a shark to actually die.
After a while, the two crew members carefully approached the hopefully dead shark. It was. They tied a short rope around its tail and hooked it to the hoist. I could then lift the creature. It hung there, midship, with its mouth wide open. It could easily swallow a person whole. The captain took the lift rope from me with a more experienced hand for what happened next. The two crewmen got the huge thing swinging back and forth like a schoolyard swing set. Once the arc was big enough, the captain quickly let off the winch to drop the dead shark over the boat’s railing. He artfully lowered the shark so Little Jimmy could cut the sacrificial rope to finally return the dead shark to its watery grave as bycatch. I was shocked by the violence I just witnessed as a large predator entered a confined human space. None of the men talked of the event, leading me to believe it was not that unusual. I wondered if they had the same question I had, “Would an overboard fisherman entering shark space be considered bycatch?”
