"Just One Of Those Days"

Interview Contact: Calvin S. Billings

I didn't know who to interview... but then I asked my father. He hesitated a little, and then said, "Sure, why not." He isn't really old enough to interview, but he had a good story to tell me... a very funny story to do with while he was shrimping.

"Well, it all started one day, when I went shrimping with Clyde Peabody. In fact it was the first time I ever went. I went on a 46 foot Novi [Nova Scotia-style] and she was rigged up for shrimping. Me and a friend of mine, Dana Betts, got a job with Clyde Peabody. We stayed aboard the boat with him while we went shrimping. We'd leave around one o'clock in the morning, so we wouldn't get out there until just before daylight. We'd set our nets for two to three hours, and then we'd bring them back in. We were doing this for a month. We got done shrimping about ten o'clock at night, so we were definitely beat when we got done.

One day we untied the lines and went out to the factory to load our shrimp nets on. We started off the factory dock, and Clyde... he was doing something else when we were running out through and wasn't paying much attention to where the buoy was. There was this ledge off the factory. We was steaming along there pretty good, and Clyde... he run up along the ledge. We couldn't get back off. So Dana and I were up on the stern of the boat, hollering and trying to get somebody's attention to help, so to get us off the ledge. There was no one up. There was no lights on anywhere. Clyde couldn't get anybody on the radio, and he didn't want to bother the Coast Guard. So we got a little life raft, one of those ones you pull a cord and it inflates... I pulled the cord and it didn't inflate. So we pumped her up with a foot pump. We threw it overboard. Clyde gave Dana a knife, so he went up around the stern, and cut the rope out of the wheel. The boat was just about ready to list with wheels right out of the water. In the meantime, she was just going down furthur and furthur...listing the starboard side, and for a while there we didn't know what was gonne happen. So at the last resort, Clyde, he tells Dana and I to "man the buckets." She was down so far, the "gunwales" was almost ready to take in water.

The all of a sudden, we see a boat coming down through the channel. I can't remember who it was know, but he came over and put a line onto us, took it and tied it off to the buoy, which was none too soon. We thought we was going to be in a little raft there swimming. After a while, he got us tied up to the buoy. She stayed there until the tide turned, so it would start floating the other way. Finally the tide got up far enough so we could back her out, and after that we still went out shrimping. We was shrimping outside of Spoon Island. That was the best day we ever had; that was the day we caught the most shrimp.

Another day I recall in the middle of January, we was just coming in from shrimping and we was taking the shrimp up to the Co-op. We got the shrimp all hoisted up on the deck. I had to go up and get the receipt, and show how many pounds of shrimp we had. So I went up the ladder to get the slip off Aldo Ciomei... no problem... but when I went to go back down the ladder, I was so tired I guess, I thought we was over to the factory dock there, well the ladders got something to hang on to, and this one was just flush with the dock, so I went to swing my foot on the ladder there, I lost my balance and went to reach for the ladder rung, which I missed and I went splashing overboard. I landed between the boat and the dock. When I was underwater, I heard Aldo Ciomei holler, "Man overboard!!" I remember hitting bottom. I still had my boots on, so I kind of pushed myself off the bottom. When I got up the ladder, I just smoked her up that ladder, man. Clyde, he didn't even know I fell overboard. So Clyde's brother put the boat in neutral, didn't see where I was. I was up on the dock at that time. I climbed on the boat, ran in, and got my clothes off in a hurry.

Kristi L. Billings