What’s a typical day like on a shrimp boat?
You’re out for 10 days to two weeks at a time. You get up at about four or five in the afternoon, clean the boat up and have a meal and start fishing. You fish all night. You and the deck hand sit there on a Coke case with your legs spread and this huge mound of assorted trash in front of you. You have a pallet. You pull it toward you and pull the shrimp out, throw them in a basket, scoop the by-catch away. You fight off the crabs. You get cut a lot. Did you like it? Yeah. Why? I got to read a lot because of the down time. And I idolized my grandfather. What’s his name? Murdock Why else? We come from like a thousand years or more of fishermen. We’re the people that [Mark] Kurlansky wrote about that ended up in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland fishing for cod. I’m the last person in my family to have earned my living as a commercial fisherman in any way. Do you ever find yourself longing for those days? Yeah. There were times when it would be nice to do it just because there’s no pressures.
