Photo: Rob Hedelt (bottom right) with his Family on his Grandfather’s (Robert C. Carden, Top Left) Boat, the Sea Ranger, where he got his early attachment to the water.
By Rob Hedelt
(An excerpt from a speech Rob Hedelt gave at Belle Isle State Park)
In 44 years as a reporter and columnist at the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, I wrote about people in every situation, every walk of life with every job or hobby that exists.
I profiled politicians, belly dancers, historians, farmers, and businessmen, as well as crafters of everything from banjos to fine furniture. One such artisan was a chaplain at St. Margaret’s School who made herself stop working on the table-saw at 9 p.m. because that’s when the ER closed at the hospital nearby in Tappahannock. Suffice to say she was a frequent visitor there.
I’ve never kept count, but figure I wrote 2,000 columns or so over those years, and at least as many articles.
Watermen and women and those who study and traverse the Chesapeake Bay and the Rappahannock and Potomac have been a special focus because, well, I love the water and see them as our area’s cowboys, earning their living from and in harmony with nature.
And I did that because the things they told me often bordered on amazing.
One was John Lowery of Northumberland County, a menhaden captain who excelled in telling stories but had conditions for the interview.
“We need to go year by year, that’s the way I remember it,” he said. When we sat down on four different occasions, he’d start by saying something like, “OK, 1938, caught 600,000 fish,” converting the number of times the holds were filled into numbers of fish.
He described a life of chasing the oily menhaden from Long Island to Key Biscayne, starting at the age of 13 when he learned to mend nets.
During our talks, the Reedville resident mentioned how he was the first to use spotter planes, noting that before plane to ship radios were available, he’d save whiskey bottles and write a note indicating where the menhaden were and then fly over the boat and toss the bottle into the water close by. He noted that an alternative was to land on the beach at Wallop’s Island, because they did have radio that could reach the boats. But he had to factor in the cost of the ticket he’d get for doing that.
Lowery, also told me a story that parents of today can hardly comprehend about a weeklong trip he and several pals, all under 15, took from Northumberland to Norfolk in a tiny skiff.
I enjoyed meeting Steve Pruitt of Northumberland, who was rowing skiffs around his home on Tangier Island when he was five and went on to spend five decades as a captain of everything from oil tankers to tourist boats and everything in between.
One of my favorite watermen was a dear family friend, Earl Jenkins of Sandy Point in Westmoreland County. I wrote about him often, drawing on the tales he shared about his time as a crewman and captain of these two and three-masted schooners that crisscrossed the Bay.
He talked of weeks spent in Baltimore harbor when thick ice locked them in, crewmen scampering back and forth across lines of boats to share food and stories. I also remember him telling me about the way they’d load boats with lumber to the point that water was on the deck, the buoyancy of the wooden cargo assuring that they’d stay afloat.
Earl gave me a nickname my family still sometime employs. I came from a day when I’d gone out to the Bay fishing on the deadrise my grandfather converted to a pleasure craft called the Sea Ranger. We only caught one fish all day long, a little spot. Because the boat was docked at the marina Jenkins operated, my grandfather told me several times not to admit to Earl that we’d only landed one fish. But telling a 5-year-old not to do something almost assures it will happen, so when Tangier-born Earl asked about our day, I popped off, “Fished all day and we only caught wowsy fish!”
Yep, for the rest of my life, he called me wowsy fish.
I specifically remember Calvin Hill, a chantey singer, who signed on to work on a menhaden boat crew at the age of 18 in 1948. He joined others in the back-breaking job of pulling up seine nets, using songs that were modeled on spirituals but weren’t all filled with words in the Gospel. I called him and left messages for weeks asking to come and interview him. Finally, I just decided to drive to his house and he was glad to talk to me, never quite explaining why he ignored my phone messages. He actually sang me a verse or two of “Help Me Raise ‘Em Up” or “I’ve Got a Girl in Georgia,” and remembered days of sleeping in bunks in the 130-foot shifts forepeak three rows high.
One of my favorite subjects has been boat-builder and boatwright John Morganthaler, who lives in Ophelia. Soft-spoken, wickedly smart and hard-working, he has spent years projects ranging from the restoration (and largely, rebuilding) of a skipjack for a fellow who just happens to be my uncle, to an equally challenging restoration of the pilot house of the steamboat Potomac. Whether it was the use of weather-treated fabric to be historically accurate for a floor or ceiling or the mental calculus required in taking the end off of the Steamboat Era Museum building to have a huge crane drop in the pilot house, it was always fascinating to talk to John, whose big workshop has salvaged lumber from houses all up and down the Northern Neck.
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