Captain George Tappin: A True Story.

 

Captain George Tappin: A True Story is the fourth short story in the series the Doings of Dudley Doolittle.

Though our old and trusted friend George Tappin is long gone he lives on fondly in our memories.

Therefore we will use his real name here and make this story a  tribute to Captain George.

Our first experiences with commercial fishing in Florida: I took George Tappin up on his offer of a day out on his shrimp trawler, Terry. It turned out that George’s wife Mary was scared to death to go out to sea with George because of an incident that occurred when they were coming in the inlet in very heavy seas. George had been going out by himself, which to me seems impossible, but he did do it just the same. The first trip I made with George was a wonderful experience, and I asked if he would mind taking Jane the next time and he agreed. The one thing that happened the first day I was out with George was that one after another his bilge pumps all failed. He rigged another and another until his seventh one didn’t work. He was a real resourceful sailor and instinctively went down to his main engine that was a 6-71 Detroit Diesel and rerouted the engine raw water pickup hose to suck the bilge water and discharge it overboard. That was enough to keep us afloat until we could get back to the dock. I have to state here one of the basic rules of boating; “the water is supposed to be on the outside.”

Jane’s reaction on her first trip out on the Terry with George was that she wished that she hadn’t wasted so many years working at the finance company back in Superior, Wisconsin. She could have been out here upon the ocean instead. There was always plenty of action on the shrimp boat.

One of my jobs on George’s boat was to open the net when it was hauled onboard and hoisted high up in the rigging. To visualize this you must consider that the boat is always in constant motion while it passes through the seas. When the full net is overhead, I would go under it and grab hold of the trip line that would open the bag portion of the net to release the catch. Timing and coordination are crucial because if the net isn’t opened at the precise time, the catch can be released back overboard while the roll of the boat keeps the net perpetually swinging overhead.

The varieties of living things that come out of the net are astounding. Crabs with their pinches poised to shake hands with you, catfish with their dorsal fins ready to stab, sting rays with their tails armed with a jagged venomous spear, electric skates will jolt you, sea turtles just want to snap, but sharks want a piece of flesh. One day when I opened the net, out came a 7-½ foot shark that was flipping around the deck like a bucking bronco but at the same time was vigorously snapping its razor sharp teeth at everything in sight. I instantly got the message and sprung up in the rigging and told George that he had a visitor to take care of. George didn’t bat an eye and came from the wheelhouse with a carpenter’s knife and took a flying tackle on the shark. Next, he slit the shark’s bottom side from one end to the other and spilled the shark’s guts onto the deck. Now the shark got even more aggressive and snatched our fishing net in its razor toothed mouth and began to aggressively thrash. Again I called George and told him of the new problem. This time he came with a hammer and commenced to bash in the shark’s head. Now the shark became docile for a moment and George then fastened a rope to the shark’s tail and hoisted it up into the air using the winch. With the roll of the boat, the shark swung overboard, and George then let the shark down so that he could cut the rope on its tail. The shark was back to thrashing again and when the rope was cut and it hit the water, the other sharks in the vicinity completely tore this shark to shreds in a seconds. After witnessing this chain of events I was convinced that you never wanted to fall overboard from a shrimp boat. For the remainder of this winter season, Jane and I went out fishing with George Tappin two or three times a week. This was some of the best fun we had our entire time in St. Augustine this winter season. We thought of ourselves extremely fortunate to be able to have this life changing opportunity. We even got paid plus as a fringe benefit we had all of the seafood we could eat.

More colorful stories of Captain George Tappin can be found in our books of our life aboard our sailboat Dursmirg. Check the following links.

Sailing Beyond Lake Superior : Travels of Dursmirg

Sailing to St. Augustine: Travels of Dursmirg

Remembering 1954: Marjories Kennen Rawlings and George Tappin

Dying of cancer the last words George spoke to me from his death bed were “John, I would give anything if I could just walk out that door.”

John's author's page on Amazon