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It was like hell. That's the only way you can describe it. I don't know how it started... as a tropical storm I guess... way out in the ocean somewhere. Then it cam on to the shore. It came up the coast ot Mass. and then it went off. You couldn't get away from it really because everything on the Georges Banks was breaking right to bottom. We ran off the shelf... the Atlantic shelf into deep water. We probably had a mile or two under us when we went off to get away from the Banks. It didn't break that much out there.

A scalloping trip usually took about ten days. We grubbed up before we went out. We took alot of food with us on the boat. We had a Swedish cook on the boat. He was good.

I was interested on hearing Virgil talk more about scalloping, but he insisted on spending time on redfishing.

We dragged for redfish with a net on bottom. The net was fifty foot across... and was probably about eight to ten feet deep. Out boat LOUISE was about forty-seven feet, but it was real wide and deep. It would probably draw about nine to ten feet of water. We could carry 50000 lbs. We didn't gut the redfish... they do that at the factory. Shirly Nevells was the cook, I ran the winch and "Big Riggin" was the hold man... he worked down in the hole icing the fish. We have one big pan of ice. We take about a ton of ice when we go out on a trip. We shovel that ice out into the pans that we put the fish in. When we get the other pans full, we shovel the rest of the ice onto the middle of the floor and fill that last pan up.

We sold our redfish at the factory in Stonington, which was where most of the crewmen lived. If we were lucky, we stayed overnight there, so we had the chance to go home and be with our families for the night.