Pictured is one of the many fishing trawlers built in St. Augustine, Florida, that we delivered to various ports in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Gulf of Mexico.
The Water is Wetter
In preparation for our escape
voyage aboard our home built and designed 46-foot sailboat Dursmirg my wife and I spent five years in night classes learning
seamanship and navigation
We launched Dursmirg, sailed away and spent the next fifteen glorious years
living aboard, cruising where the wind blew and when the spirit moved us.
St. Augustine, Florida
became our port of call.
Our maritime knowledge led us to a number
of boat delivery jobs. These took us to
a variety of distant ports such as Trinidad, Panama, Baja California, Texas,
and Yucatan, Mexico, to name a few. This was not a get rich quick business but
we loved the sea, strange new ports, and we were treated well.
These deliveries were primarily of
brand new DESCO or St. Augustine trawlers, all were well over 100 tons in
displacement. The passages were more than five days and some as much as a
month. They were followed by the logistics of return flights back to our home port of St. Augustine.
This was an especially fun and
interesting interlude in our lives.
The major company we delivered for
was DESCO (Diesel Engine Sales Company), a division of Whitaker Corporation. At the time it was the world’s number one
producer of trawlers with a motto “The Sun Never Sets on a DESCO Boat.”
DESCO was actively looking for new
markets for expanding their sales.
As a promotion they built the “super
trawler” using their 128 ton displacement fiberglass hull, then the world’s
largest production line fiberglass trawler. This was an ultra luxury vessel loaded with
all the latest state of the art amenities and gadgets. It was made to impress.
The DESCO dreamboat was paraded at all the commercial boat shows and
fisherman’s fairs, including Miami, Annapolis, New York City, and Lunenburg,
Nova Scotia, Canada, and many more. Its
uniqueness warranted a second look that made other boats appear shoddy by
comparison.
The super trawler trip to Lunenburg, Canada,
for exhibition at the fishermen’s fair was captained by our friend Eddie Long,
a long time employee of DESCO.
There was only one problem; the trip
didn’t generate any new orders.
Jane and I, having made numerous
boat deliveries for DESCO, were actively involved in the industry with our own
commercial shrimp trawler, Secotan.
While we were making an autumn
sojourn into Nova Scotia,
Canada,
we were lucky enough to attend the last of the fisherman’s fair at Lunenburg.
This North Atlantic seaport town was made
famous in the sailing industry for their foundry that set a world standard for
marine hardware…especially their coal and wood fired galley stoves.
The show catered to all aspects of
the fishing industry from fish hooks and nets to canned, cured and frozen
seafood. It was educational and fun.
We were anxious to find out the
reaction of maritime Canada’s
fishing industry to the new DESCO trawler.
The response of all the fishermen
queried about the new DESCO trawler was the same, negative head shakes. “Why?” we asked. The reply was with the simple explanation,
“The water is wetter up here.”
We didn’t quite grasp the
significance of that statement until later when we visited family in Norway and
witnessed the horrific sea conditions that northern latitude fishermen, like
the Norwegians, New Englanders, and Canadians, were actually fishing in.
We had assumed that ocean fishing
was the same worldwide. In the raging North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans the
fishermen fitted out their vessels to cope with storm ravaged conditions,
dressed accordingly, and, of course, possessed a genetic predisposition to their
rugged seafaring Viking ancestors.
Back in Florida, where we had learned
and done our commercial fishing, ports would be closed to boat traffic when
weather deteriorated to conditions those northern latitude fishermen worked in
every day.
DESCO had assumed fishing worldwide
was all the same…wrong! Administrative decisions were made by men who had no
conception of the brutal reality that Mother Nature dished out. Glitter and
glitz appealed to them, not no-frills functional ability. Their concerns leaned toward plush carpet, sumptuous
easy chairs, and a well stocked liquor cabinet with a push button galley and
butler. The management must have wanted to sell dazzling pleasure yachts
instead of functional work boats. They
wrongly assumed when they should have been thinking. The executives were out of
touch with reality and their assumption cost them a lot of money, in fact it
was not long and the sun set on DESCO.
This taught Jane and me a good
lesson. We should never assume anything. Think, and always remember that you
will never know it all.
Our old fishing partner Captain
George Tappin was found of saying about the commercial fishing industry: “You
are not going to learn it all in just one day.”
Now we understand the meaning of “the
water is wetter.”
We have made numerous autumn excursion
trips by VW camper van to the Maritime Provinces of New Brunswick, Prince Edward
Island, Nova Scotia,
and Newfoundland.
The Maritime Provinces of Canada are one of our all-time favorite places in North America.
Recommended reading on the subject of "the water is wetter."
The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea by Sebastian Junger
A Hungry Ocean: A Swordboat Captain's Journey by Linda Greenlaw
For further reading about our boat delivery and VW campervan adventures, read:
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