By Marie Hughes, director of the Chambers County Museum in Wallisville
I had the pleasure of visiting with George William “Bill” Hisler of Oak Island and his son, George Hisler, both involved in the fishing industry of Oak Island, Texas. Bill is the grandson of George W. Hisler and Lois Gertrude Gregory. Lois was the granddaughter of John Thomas and Jerusha Watson of Chambers County. During the early 1900s, John Watson operated a schooner between Galveston and Lake Charlotte. In 1926, at the tender age of 14, Lois married George W. Hisler, who was 36 years her senior. She moved to the Pelly oilfield, where George had lived since 1906. Together, George and Lois had one daughter, Thelma Louise, and three sons, Robert, Billy Gene, and Johnny. George died in 1946, leaving Lois a widow at the age of 34 to raise their four children.
“My dad, Robert Hisler, was born in Pelly Oil Field, Baytown,” said Bill Hisler. “When he began working, he ran crew boats for the oil field in the bay. His dad, my grandfather, George W. Hisler, was a fisherman, but just to supplement the family income. He would catch shrimp for bait. Back then, people didn’t eat shrimp that much; it was mostly used for bait. When they started eating it, people said, unbelievably, ‘You eat that?’ He answered, ‘Yes, it’s better than the fish,’” laughed Bill.
“My granddad died when my dad was twelve years old,” added Bill somberly. “I’d have to say my dad got started full-time in the fishing business around 1970. I had three uncles on my dad’s side who fished for a living also, so we made frequent trips to Chambers County before we moved here. I remember when my Uncle Billy Gene Hisler built a shrimp boat in his front yard in Oak Island when I was about ten years old.”
“Before we moved here, we came in the sixties and spent three months gill-netting down on Bolivar Island for speckled trout and redfish. We did that a couple of years in a row. We just camped out on the beach for two to three months. They outlawed gill-netting on the beach around 1969 or 1970. They still did a little gill-netting in the bay, but it’s mostly all trot-lining now. A gill net was about two football fields long.”
“You’d have to stretch them out,” added George, “and the size of the mesh was about three to four inches, depending on the size of fish you were catching. They call it a gill net because their gills would get caught on the net and they couldn’t get away.”
“When my dad moved here in 1970, he began peddling shrimp and oysters. He bought a little boat he named The Sweep. It was an old wooden hull boat, 45 feet long and really narrow. I saw it years later and thought, ‘Man, we were on that!’” he said with a chuckle.
“When I was in high school, Dad bought a Menhaden pogie boat out of Louisiana, and it wasn’t but about 40 feet long. Dad restructured it with decking and a cabin and refitted it for shrimping. He called it The Captain Bob,” said Bill. “I was probably in the tenth grade at the time, and Dad had it in the front yard of our place on 563, near where the bait shop is now. I welded and worked on that boat, built the fuel tanks—whatever he’d let me do after school. And I say ‘let me do’ because I enjoyed working. Once it was ready, we worked it up and down the coast from Louisiana to Matagorda and Corpus Christi, oystering and shrimping, wherever the money was being made.”
Burning the candle at both ends
“Fishermen are just like farmers,” George continued. “They burn the candle at both ends, getting up by 4 a.m. and working until after dark. They go from can-to-can’t,” he laughed. “Your boat was already ready to go because of weeks of working on it, and you were in the bay by 5 a.m. You would run a try-net, drag it for a few minutes, then check it. If you had some shrimp in there, you might try a little longer, then put in the big net. You just keep doing that all day long.
“You would do that till dark because you needed the whole day. Texas Parks and Wildlife allows you to be in the water 30 minutes before sunrise, and you have to be out 30 minutes after sunset. Those are the hours for shrimping. You can fish after dark, but you can’t pull a net.
“Back then, a few hundred to 500 pounds of shrimp was normal. A 300-pound day was average, and 1,000 pounds would be a good day. Back then, they were worth more than they are now. The average was $2 to $2.50 a pound off the boat. The bigger ones would bring $3 to $3.50. But the money was there at $2 a pound, and fuel was between 50 and 80 cents a gallon. If we burned 80 gallons in a day, it was a lot.”
George added, “And everything was seasonal. You weren’t shrimping all year long. At the end of the day, we headed for the fish house. In the early days, the Kreuzers had the fish house in Oak Island, and we’d off-load there.
“We had already sorted them on the boat as we were catching them, so once at the dock, we shoveled them into baskets, ran them up, weighed them, fueled up, and put ice back on the boat to get ready for the next day. Then, we’d do it all over again. You’d patch your net, work on whatever’s broken—because there’s always something,” explained Bill.
Bill shared a more recent memory about fishing during the pandemic. “The first year of the COVID epidemic, I worked with George. We worked for four days, 18 hours a day. We had a quota we needed to catch, and everyone quit working. We couldn’t find anyone to go out.
“I decided I was going to show him how it was done, and after four days, I was down,” he laughed as he continued. “I said, ‘Son, I think we’re going to have to go in now.’ Ten thousand pounds,” he added softly, noting how much they had caught.
George chimed in, “We had some other crew members, but they were dropping like flies on the way out, and I had to take them back to the docks.”
Oyster fishing is done a little differently, the Hislers explained. “When we are fishing for oysters, we use a metal dredge about 14 inches wide that has teeth on the bottom to go down in the mud or reef,” explained Bill.
“It has a cage around it, kind of like cyclone fencing,” added George. “It sifts the mud out and picks up the oyster shells as you’re dragging it.”
“We packed them in 120-pound sacks back then,” Bill added. “It was nasty, cold, and miserable work because oyster time was always in the wintertime, but I didn’t have a problem with it. I loved it,” he said, speaking with the heart of a true fisherman.
“Oyster season opens Nov. 1 and ends usually in April,” continued Bill. “In the spring, white shrimp usually start showing up in the bay. By May, the brownies would start hatching and getting thick in the bays.”
George noted, “Off the coast of Texas, we predominantly have the Gulf White and the Gulf Brown shrimp. There are other species, but those are the ones most sought after. During the off-season, our time is spent working on the boat and equipment to make sure everything is in good shape for the next season,” Bill added.
“Later, in 1978, Dad bought a genuine shrimp boat he named The Edna Hisler, after his mother,” said Bill. “I took it over in 1981.”
“It was an actual commercial fishing vessel that could be outfitted for shrimping, oystering, and different types of fishing,” interjected Bill’s son, George. “Back then, it was primarily shrimping and oystering they were doing, but today I have that same boat and strictly use it for red snapper fishing in the Gulf of Mexico,” he added.
“My grandpa had nets on it, and when I was growing up, I would work dragging the nets. I never oystered on that boat,” George clarified.
Bill recalled, “The first thing I told my dad when I saw the Edna Hisler was, ‘I can take that boat snapper fishing.’ Snapper fishing was a big thing then, but I never considered taking the boats I had into deep water. I could tell this one was a well-built, seaworthy boat.
“I’ve had the Edna Hisler in some pretty mean, should-not-have-been-there water,” Bill said.
‘We were struggling’
“When they first opened snapper fishing, they got to a 10-day season a month,” Bill said. “If you didn’t work those 10 days, it was closed until next month, and we were struggling. We were making a living, but we were just barely getting by. So if you missed those 10 days, it was tough. In the Galveston area, you could catch snapper 20 miles offshore, but the good fishing starts between 30 and 60 miles.”
“A couple of days before the season opened, you would prep the boat,” George explained. “You’d load it up with 600 to 800 pounds of bait, fuel, groceries, and four or five deckhands. Milt’s Seafood in Port Bolivar is where we would stop to get ice, fuel, and bait.”
“When it got to the point where we were ready, it was fishing 24 hours a day,” Bill exclaimed.
“When I started snapper fishing, there was a hand-crank setup using a bigger reel that held 500 to 600 feet of line because you’re fishing in 100-plus feet of water,” George said. “There was a belt-driven spool, like you would use on a fishing pole, but much bigger, called a bandit reel.”
“Before that, they used bicycle parts,” Bill added with a laugh.
“Yes, whatever they could build,” George said. “Or probably hand-lined—they hand-lined for a long time.”
“The Vietnamese still hand-line,” Bill noted. “And they do okay with it, but they have a lot more people onboard doing it. They hand-line tuna fish and swordfish. Man, you’re talking 100 to 200 pounds. Swordfish can be up to 500 pounds.”
“I don’t think there’s too many of them that hand-line now,” George said. “But there’s some that still do.”
“I’ve seen them hand-line some big fish,” Bill added. “I have a lot of respect for them. They’re some hard workers.”
“An average day for us would be about 1,000 pounds of snapper,” Bill said. “They travel in schools, but for the most part, they like to bunch up on structure—valves, rocks, reefs, anything sticking up. They’re considered a reef fish.”
Long lining
“In the late ’80s, I worked for my brother, Randy,” Bill said. “He had the Mr. Prowler and the Jackpot. There was one picture of my brother Randy and two or three of his crew members sitting on top of a mako shark they caught off his boat. It was bigger than this table,” said Bill, referencing our 10-foot conference table.
Bill and George explained how sharks can be a real menace to fishermen. They eat their fish and destroy their gear. Bill said they will even eat shrimp, including the net. “There is no way of knowing they are in the area until you start trying to pull in your catch and see the damage,” Bill explained.
“I once caught an 800-pound swordfish when I was fishing with my brother, Randy,” Bill stated. “That was when we were long-lining, laying out 60 miles of trotline with 1,000 hooks. We did that in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. It would take us about eight hours to lay the line and about 24 hours to pick it back up,” he said.
“Randy took a boat to the West Coast one time, and they had two 60-mile spools,” Bill continued. “The boat belonged to the buyer he was dealing with, but the equipment belonged to my brother. The buyer was buying fish and shipping it to China. They would have guys on the boat who would plug the fish and grade it for either sushi, plate grade, or the cannery,” added George. “Then they would pack each whole fish in a waxed carton and ship it to China.
“When they long-lined, they would tie the lines to a buoy so they would know where to find them and float the weighted lines,” George explained, returning to the topic of long-lining. “Today, they usually only lay down about 20 miles of line using 500- to 600-pound test on a 3-foot diameter spool.”
“There was a lot of outlaw fishing going on—shrimping after dark, bringing in more than your allowable catch, shrimping too close to shore,” Bill admitted. “You could get a fine, have your catch confiscated, or even have your boat taken or be sent to jail. I’ve had a few loads taken,” he confessed. “I’d take my punishment and move on. It got that bad to make it at times; you do what you have to do to survive.”
“I got away from all that,” George said. “I keep the laws now, but snapper fishing is different than shrimping,” he clarified.
“When I was 15 to 18 years old, I worked on several different boats, jumping from one to another, working as a deckhand,” George said. “Rachal and I met during high school at the church youth group. During the time we were dating, Rachal didn’t want me to be gone on the boat, so I started working at the fish house and in my Uncle Robby’s restaurant. He had Hisler Seafood Restaurant at the Highlands exit on the south I-10 feeder.
“Rachal and I married in 2000. I was still in high school, and Rachal had already graduated. After I graduated, we moved to Austin, which was near the area where Rachal was raised. We returned to the Houston area in 2005 and back to Oak Island in the fall of 2005 to work on the boats again. It had been five or six years since I’d been on a boat, and I started working as a deckhand again for Dad—snapper fishing this time. There wasn’t much shrimping going on.”
“There was just no money in it,” Bill added. “By the ’90s, shrimping had really started going downhill fast. The decline was due to cheap imports and high fuel prices.”
“Texas Parks and Wildlife also put in certain regulations,” George said. “In certain seasons, you could only drag certain size nets. Over time, they added more and more regulations, and I think that was a big part of the decline in shrimping,” he surmised.
“Remember, shrimp was going for $2.50 to $3 a pound in the bay,” Bill added. “Since they began importing, it has dropped to $1 a pound to the boats. That, plus overfishing beginning in ’75, affected the shrimping industry.”
The father-son duo described how NOAA Fisheries changed the red snapper program over to a quota system in 2007. “In the ’90s, NOAA began the logbook program,” George explained. “Each boat had to have a permit and a logbook associated with that permit.
“It was then that I began running the Derek’s Pride for Dad. He was still running the Edna. Dad bought the Derek’s Pride in 2006 and converted it to a snapper boat. NOAA Fisheries used the catch log data from each permit, over a span of years, to determine the quota assigned to it, and they really reduced the allowable catch,” George said.
“I was heavily relying on vermilion snapper and a few other species to help supplement and make money because the snapper quota was not enough. Snapper was the only fish under the quota system, except for King Mackerel, which I didn’t catch a lot of. Since the quota system began in 2007, they have increased the quota to give back to the fishermen, so the majority of our catch now is red snapper,” he concluded.
Following in his father’s wake
“In 2008, I started my corporation, George W. Hisler II, Inc.,” said George. “It wasn’t until 2011 that I bought the permit and got the boat. The only thing I didn’t own was snapper allocation, but I had a permit to catch fish and other species. I started leasing quota from other red snapper fishermen.
“Rachal and I are co-owners of the business. I run it, and she takes care of the financial side of it—the accounting, taxes, etc. She’s very good at staying on top of the legal requirements, leasing agreements, and accounting. We work well together as a good team.”
“When I was catching vermilion snapper, I had to be out for 10 days. Once my boat was loaded with 12,000 pounds of ice, 600 pounds of bait, and 2,000 gallons of fuel from Milt’s Seafood, we would leave out of the Galveston jetties. I would either go straight out, turn left toward Louisiana, or right down the coast toward South Texas.
“If I was fishing for vermilion snapper, I would fish 80 to 100 miles out in 300- to 400-foot waters. If I was fishing for red snapper, I could fish in as little as 100-foot waters. The first day, I would usually fish a 24-hour clock to determine if they were hitting better during the day or night and how deep. I would adjust from there.
“Usually, the vermilion snapper we would fish at night, and I would start building up that catch first before turning to the red snapper, because I only needed 1,000 pounds of them. I needed 2,000 pounds of vermilion, and it would usually take the 10-day period to get my entire catch.
“It didn’t take near as much time to get the red snapper because the fish stock had rebounded due to the quota system being put in place. It also helped that they began limiting the recreational fishing industry.
“Another benefit to the quota system,” George noted, “is that I am not limited to a 10-day period. I can take all year to get my quota, so that takes a lot of pressure off of me.
“My goal for an average seven-day trip is 10,000 pounds of American red snapper. That is my goal, and I typically reach it. There are a few times I don’t, due to variables like weather, crew members, or maintenance problems, but that’s not the norm. I have four fishing bandits, so I have four men fishing and one cleaning their catch and packing them on ice.”
High seas and five-second swells
“The Derek’s Pride was not the best boat. It was built with a flat bottom with a tunnel hull for the wheel, so you could get into shallower water with it,” George said.
“It was not deep-sea worthy,” Bill interjected. “As a matter of fact, it got dangerous.”
“Once we were at the beginning of the 10-day season and had already made two trips,” George said. “Two cold fronts had come through, and there was a pattern of three. The third one was forecast to hit the next night. I had gone in to unload my second trip and was going to sit and wait it out, but that wouldn’t leave enough time to go out and get another catch. Dad said, ‘Let’s go catch some fish, nobody’s waiting!’ So I headed back out.
“I got out there and started fishing, and we almost reached our limit of 2,000 pounds, but it started getting rough. We were anchored up at night with 10-foot seas. The waves started coming up and hitting the side of the boat, and one wave came over and knocked J.C., my 60-some-year-old hand, off his feet and across the deck. We all decided we were done. We put the fish up, secured the hatches, and went into the cabin to lay down and wait it out.
“We woke up in the middle of the night, and the anchor line had broken. The boat was drifting, and we now had 15- to 16-foot seas. I’ve been in some rough stuff, but this was the roughest I’d ever been in. I usually shut the boat down at night, but for some reason, I had left it running. I went to the wheel and started heading toward Freeport—I was done.
“Freeport is normally a six-hour ride from where I was, about 20 miles offshore. The seas were now at 17- to 18-foot swells, and that is nasty and dangerous. Usually, a good swell takes about 10 seconds to get from the trough to the crest and back to the trough. These were taking five seconds. You’d go up, get dropped, and head into the next one, and then there were cross waves bouncing off the bulkhead.
“The outriggers were out with stabilizers we call ‘birds,’ which catch the water to keep you from pitching and rolling so badly. When I came up, the wave action jerked three times really hard. On the third time, it snapped the rope, and the chain with the big metal ring caught the block. I still had my stabilizer at that time, but a couple more hard jerks, and the metal ring collapsed and went through the block.
“The boat came up so high on that side because of the big waves that it almost rolled over. It threw me off the wheel, and I landed on the side door of the cabin like it was the floor. I thought the boat was going to roll, and I’m surprised it didn’t. It did that twice before I could get back to the wheel.
“I turned straight into the big waves because I had no choice at that point. Luckily, the small waves on the opposite side were helping me stay upright. I could only do about three knots. For 16 hours, I stayed on the wheel, fighting it. Thank God I was heading north-northeast, which put me dead in line with the Galveston jetties. It took forever to get there. I could’ve been in Freeport in a couple of hours if everything hadn’t happened the way it did.
“Everything in the cabin was in disarray, and I lost whatever was loose on the back deck. The guys never got out of the bunks—they were too scared—except for one of my deckhands who had been with me for about 10 years. After the stabilizer broke, he was right there with me the whole time. That woke everyone up. They thought we were going down. I was scared. I knew there were 20-foot waves at the peak,” George described.
“I downplayed it,” Bill admitted. “I was on the Edna and deal with rough weather all the time, but I didn’t realize how unseaworthy his boat was in high seas.”
“He called to check on me the next day and asked where I was,” George said. “I told him, ‘Galveston—we almost died! You told me to go out, and we almost died!’” George exclaimed, laughing about it after the fact.
“It still didn’t stop me from going out and staying in rough weather,” George said. “I just learned to work smarter, not harder. I listen constantly to the weather station and move closer, within 10 miles of shore, if the weather gets too rough. I’m very thankful I haven’t experienced anything worse than that,” he added with genuine relief.
Note: This story will be continued in next month’s installment of The Age.