Editor’s note: This is part 2 in a series compiled by Marie Hughes, director of the Chambers County Museum at Wallisville. The first part is linked below.
“I was headed offshore the day before Allison hit in 2001,” said George William “Bill” Hisler of Oak Island. “The next morning, I’m probably 70 to 80 miles out, headed to a specific spot. By the time I got there, I couldn’t even hear the weather guy anymore, but he had been saying it was going to calm down the next day.
“By three o’clock in the morning I’m seeing lightning start at one horizon and go all the way across, back and forth, and the wind is getting stronger and stronger, Allison is building up. I started flipping channels trying to catch an update, listening to what I could hear from the offshore supply boats and such on the Coast Guard channel. I heard this one guy say it was blowing a 100 miles an hour and the low pressure was sitting right there and it was going to build up stronger the next day.
“I had already anchored up at three a.m. and was going to wait it out. A few hours later I got up and opened the side door and stuck my head out and the wind was blowing so hard it was stinging my face. I said, ‘Whoa, boys, this is looking a little tropical out here!’
“It was supposed to get worse and sit there for three days, so I said, ‘we gotta go!’ I pulled the anchor up and we started heading in. That was an all-day nightmare trying to get in.
“The Hill Bank, a big long shoal that runs off of Louisiana and kind of down towards Freeport, is 30 miles out and it comes up to about 20 foot of water. When I got into the Hill Bank, the seas were 20 foot in 20 foot of water. It was hairy, we were going with the wind, and it took us 10 hours to get in.
“By the time I got in the low pressure moved on in the next day over Houston and stalled, so I turned around and went back out,” he said with a chuckle.
A near disaster in the mid-’90s
“Another occasion was an all-night affair in the mid-90s,” continued Bill. “I was 80 miles offshore and I’m snapper fishing by now, with a crew of five. It was rough with 10-to-15-foot seas, but it was a 10-day season, and I couldn’t wait, I had to go.
“I believe there was a low-pressure system that had gone by, it was still rough, but we were in a seaworthy boat and you don’t have all the equipment like you did fishing for shrimp, so you could ride it out. When you’re that far out you’re not going to come back in, we’d just fish when we could.
“I had stopped in a spot and we were motor fishing, I was just holding it in position with the boat and the electronics while the guys fish a little bit. You can’t anchor up at that depth, it just takes too much time to do it and then do it again each time you move. The water wasn’t breaking or white-capping, it was just pretty huge round swells.
“It was getting towards evening, but not too late, we still had daylight. I’m at the wheel, looking back watching the lines and seeing if they are catching fish and I’m also watching my gear.
“All of a sudden, my radar just blinks out. I didn’t think much of it and figured I’d check it out in a minute. Then my bilge alarm (high-water alarm) came on. I kept it positioned low in the boat so it would give me an early warning. Usually, it’s the stuffing box on the shaft leaking water and I’d deal with it after awhile.
“A few minutes later everything blinked out. I had no electronics, no lights, nothing. At that point I knew something was going on and I ran back there and looked in the engine room, there was water up to the manifolds on the motor. I hollered at the crew to start pitching water and I went down in there, I had to find out what’s going on. The floorboards are floating, it is not a good situation already.
“I have to go figure out where the water is coming in at, we have a pipe system with valves throughout and an emergency back-up pump system. What caused my lights to go out was the water hit my battery box and it went down in the bottom. My generator is sitting off to the left when I go around the engine and it is still running and putting off sparks like crazy.
“I had to walk right by it, I didn’t touch it, but I had to get to the valves to turn on the emergency pump on while trying to keep my head out of the water. I switched it over and got it going but it wasn’t working either. I figured, uh oh, it’s the stuffing box.
“I hollered at the crew to get to the stuffing box and get me a five-gallon bucket. I grabbed the bucket and started bailing the water and handing it up. The opening was over my head and the ladder was gone. I wasn’t making any headway but I was holding it where it was.
“The crew were not able to do anything about the stuffing box, so I stopped bailing and headed to the freezer compartment, the ice hold, where the stuffing box was, my boat, my responsibility.
“We had a lot of frozen bait iced down in the ice hold and we had beds where we were going to start putting fish we’d catch, so it’s frozen down there, it’s cold, with 12,000 pounds of ice in it.
“One of the crew members said, ‘do you think I could make it to that drilling rig over there?’ It was about ten miles off.
“I said, ‘no, don’t you dare get off this boat right now, it’s still floating, dude.’
“I get into the freezer compartment and the water is only knee-deep in there, but the shaft is in there under freezing water. I lay down in the water and felt around and yup, the stuffing box is gone. I found the main hub that holds the packing in but, of course, the packing is all gone, it’s a three-inch shaft inside a four inch pipe and water is pouring in.
“I pulled the hub back and that slowed it down. I held it there while I was feeling around for nuts and I found one. I started trying to put it on, but now my hand is so cold I can’t feel anything.
“I knew I had to do something, so I hollered up to the crew to find me some rubber foam, put some grease on it and get me a roll of duct tape. They stripped a mattress and greased it down and handed it to me with the duct tape.
“I wrapped the foam around the shaft and stuffed it in there until I knew the water would be stopped and pulled the hub back up. I noticed my other hand wasn’t frozen like the other and realized the water coming in was warmer, so I started warming my frozen hand while I worked with the other.
“Once I got it all back together, I started wrapping and wrapping the duct tape around it. I kept wrapping until I had to get out of there. If I hadn’t had to cut it off it would still be there,” said Bill with a laugh.
“I was so cold I barely could get myself out of there. I crawled up the ladder, rolled over on the deck and started quivering. By the time I got over it and was able to get up and start walking around, my nephew and the rest of the crew already had it bailed out.
“We still had the motor, no lights, no generator, no power, just a compass, and we’re eighty to ninety miles out. It took us ten hours or so to get in the next day, got to the dock and got the little handful of fish we had off, we were only a couple days into the season.
“I went to the parts house and got a starter, some batteries, and antifreeze and threw everything back together. Still had no lights so we worked with 12-volt lights, and I still made my ten days,” said Bill with satisfaction.
“You had to,” added Bill’s son, George. “You couldn’t stop. You had to feed your family. You never got ahead. Even now, I’m not ahead.”
The Money Load
“The biggest catch I ever had I got while shrimping on the Whiskey River,” stated Bill. “That’s a once-in-a-lifetime catch. It was the opening day of the season. They close the Texas Gulf May 15 to let the little brownies grow, and they leave it closed for 45-60 days—they can fluctuate it.
“During that time, you’ve got these white shrimp that are around, and they start spawning. Usually, July 15 the shrimping season opens. Normally, by then, that spawn is over, and you have to go after brownies, which are smaller shrimp, deeper water, different rigging, and totally different kind of shrimping.
“I usually like to go after those white shrimp because when they do spawn, they do it near the beach in shallow water. They spawn all over, but they really like to bunch up close to the shore.
“Before the opening, you go out and run a little test net, trying to get a feel of where you want to make the opening. You have ideas where they usually are, but they’re not always there. I went out to the jetties and made some tries, and there were other boats there too, and there was nothing—no fish, no nothing.
“I got up by the Galveston Seawall and started moving down the beach. I made a couple of tries and had some pretty good tests—one hundred of my kind of shrimp, about ten pounds. I hit a hundred a couple of times in a few minutes, and I knew they were there, but you’d have it, and then there would be none. It got really streaky sometimes.
“I got down near San Luis Pass and got two in a row of a hundred, and in a little bit, there was another one. I thought, ‘This is good, we’ll try here tomorrow,’ so I moved away from there so other boats wouldn’t see me and moved on down the beach about ten miles before dropping anchor.
“By then, it’s getting late, and the season is going to open in the morning at daylight.
“The next morning, I got up, and the water was a little choppy and rough. I moved on down to where I was going to start shrimping, pulled everything out, put everything in the water, and started fishing. I started running the try net again, and it was like nothing… nothing… and I thought, ‘Oh Lordy, here we go.’
“So I moved in really close, and the boat’s bumping the bottom, and still nothing, so I had to pull back out. I got right on that quarter-mile line, which is probably about 15 feet of water, and I’d have a few. It was actually okay. Every couple of hours, we’d get a thousand to fifteen hundred pounds.
“There were a couple more boats there—usually, it’s tight, but with all the blank tries, most of them had moved on. So he and I worked down to the seawall and then back towards San Luis Pass. We ended up with about four thousand pounds that day, and they were all nine-count shrimp, big as they get here.
“This is the first day of the season, so you need to make a good catch. Actually, you really need to make a good first week.
“We went and anchored up—you can’t shrimp at night within five miles of the shore—and the next morning, we went back to our same spot. It was just me and that one other guy out there.
“We started testing, and there was nothing… nothing… zero. It was like they disappeared. But the water had really calmed down slick—no movement, no wind.
“The other guy made a couple of tries, and I saw him pick up—he was leaving.
“So I started moving in toward shore. I’d drop a try net, pull for a few minutes, and bring it back in. I got on top and started bumping and easing on through there, dropped it in there for ten minutes, and pulled it in, and I had a full basket.
“That’s 360 in ten minutes,” Bill exclaimed excitedly.
“I didn’t even put it back in the water. I just hung it up and got everything ready so we could get it up, ‘cause you can only lift so much. I dragged another ten minutes, picked up, and the nets were full.
“I haven’t seen a net that full except one time when I was young with my dad. With my dad, we just had a little boat and pulled all the rigging down, trying to lift it, but this was the Whiskey River. This was the biggest drag I’ve ever heard of.
“There’s no way of knowing how much I got in that first twenty-minute tow, but it had to be between five to six thousand pounds. They were so thick they were in the wings of the net—that’s just the spreading part.”
“I’ve never seen a drag where the bag was full,” added George, “let alone up to the wings.”
“My son Justin was with me,” said Bill, “plus a couple more hands. If it wasn’t for Justin, I don’t know what I would have done. There’s always a little bit of something to throw back, but they were clean—they weren’t sandy or dirty.
“I wish I had a picture of it,” he exclaimed. “We had shrimp piled so high on the boat we had to spread nets over them so I could walk. Then I had the bright idea to make another tow.
“So we threw the nets back in and towed for another 20 minutes. I picked back up, and this time it wasn’t super full—it was just right. It just filled the bags up, which would have been another two or three thousand pounds.
“I had to leave them in the water ‘cause there wasn’t any room.
“I started easing towards the jetties. When you’re at San Luis Pass, heading towards the jetties is a 3 to 4-hour run without dragging that stuff in the water.
“So, it took me a while. I kept speeding up ‘cause I thought I wasn’t going to get there in time to unload.
“I called the fish house and told them I was on my way, so they waited late. I kept pushing it until I pulled the pucker out of the webbing, and it let that drag go, which was probably a blessing.
“I still ended up with just under 10,000 pounds, but I only got $1.50 a pound then because of the market, and I’m talking about shrimp as big and as fresh as they come.
“But I still made $30,000 that week, ‘cause I went back out and got another 9,000 pounds, but it took me five days, which is typical. Nobody else was catching anything—there were a few boats doing a little.
“We worked a lot of shrimp for a dollar a pound—matter of fact, it was my bread and butter. Usually, you don’t get in those big ones like that, and when you do, you’re catching two, three, four hundred pounds of them, maybe.
“I told Brother Bob at the Oak Island Church I thought someone was praying for me.
“We struggled for a long time, but around 2000, things started picking up, and we’ve been doing okay. When I bought the Whiskey River, the price went to $.50 a pound, but even at that, we had some big hauls. Last year, we worked three days, and I had 30,000 pounds, and that was 9 to 10-hour nights in July.
“They were pretty shrimp, too—they weren’t the great big ones, but they were large. We got eighty cents a pound for them, and it wasn’t enough money—we burnt that in fuel.
“That was good fishing, but we still just broke even,” said Bill, shaking his head.
“My Grandfather, George W. Hisler, had a bait camp, in the 30s and 40s, by the Cedar Bayou draw bridge on Tri-City Beach Rd.,” said Robby Hisler, eldest son of Robert. “Back in the day, instead of roads, there was just a draw bridge across there.
“Later, in the sixties, Uncle Eddie, who was on Grandma’s side, had a bait camp in Oak Island, selling seafood and crabs at that time as well. When I was seven or eight years old, he had already been there for years.
“In the mid-nineties, I had a seafood restaurant called Hisler Seafood by the Highlands exit on I-10. There was a fruit stand there, and I took it over and put in my restaurant. We were there for ten years and did really well.
“I also had another one on Garth Road, by where the Whataburger is now. I had four fish trucks, five boats, two fish houses, two fish markets, and two restaurants all at the same time, and I built twenty-three boats over the years.
“I woke up one morning and decided I’d had enough and started selling everything.”
No matter the weather, we go out
“I started fishing when I was about fourteen,” said Robby. “I was working for Billy, my uncle, on his boat, the Miss Ruth, and after a few years, I ended up buying the boat.
“My first boat was a little ole Lafitte skiff I bought out of Louisiana. I gave the guy a hundred dollars a month and a dollar a day interest when I was nineteen years old.
“I’d get caught out there on the bigger boats when it was so rough I had to run sideways of the seas and had to tack like a sailboat to keep the forty-foot outriggers from breaking off. It would dip the outriggers on one side and then dip them on the other, and water would wash across the boat. Yeah, we’ve been in some pretty rough seas.
“I got sick every time I went out to the jetties,” laughed Robby, “but once I got set up and started fishing and working, I’d forget about it. I loved it. It was something different every day. Fishing is different every day.
“You’re in different places every day—you might be in front of Galveston today and down off Cameron tomorrow. And you never knew what you were going to make. You had to be good to make money, and we always made money.
“Back then, there were stories about us running drugs because we did really well and were always driving new trucks. They used to keep undercover officers on our boats. We never knew they were undercover until years later.
“I was friends with some of them years later as deputies, and they would tell me about it. They never found anything because there was nothing to find except seafood. We were just hard-working people.
“We fished every day—fair weather, rough weather—we go out. That’s what we were taught,” he stated proudly.
“It was always an adventure with Dad,” said Robby with a chuckle. “We had a rope break one time with Dad—I think it was an outrigger cable that broke.
“Dad was standing at the wench, pulling the rope on the cathead, pulling the bag in. When that cable snapped, the outrigger was pulling around behind him, and I must have seen it out of the corner of my eye.
“I hollered at him before he got turned around, ‘Look out behind you!’
“He ducked, and that outrigger came right over the top of his head. That would have hurt him bad.”
The outlaws and the starfish
“Back then we were outlaws. If the game warden got on your boat, you kept him on the boat so he wouldn’t get the other two or three,” laughed Robby.
“I remember one time I was fishing with Dad. I was sixteen, and my hair was full and wild all over my head. We pulled up to the dock, and the game warden stepped out from behind the fish house door. Dad just reached up, put it in reverse, and backed up, and I started pouring all the shrimp overboard we had caught that day—all but the limit.
“We pulled back up, and the game warden got on the boat, and I never will forget this,” chuckled Robby. “This guy was mad, ‘cause he had been standing on the dock hollering at us, ‘You can’t do that! Stop! You can’t do that!’ But we did.
“He was opening and closing boxes, slamming them shut, and then he found a flounder. He found a little old flounder,” laughed Robby, recalling the incident, “and he picked it up and shook the flounder at Dad.
“He said, ‘I’ve got you, I’ve got you now.’
“Daddy had a ruler I made him to measure the fish with ‘cause the fish had to be twelve inches, and he reached up and got that ruler and said, ‘Well, let’s measure that.’
“Daddy laid that ruler down, and the game warden put the fish on top of it. It was about three-eighths of an inch over the line, and he was already gutted.
“That game warden started trying to push that fish together all the while saying, ‘You broke it, you broke its neck,’” said Robby, and we both were consumed with laughter as he relived the moment.
“He said he was going to write him a ticket anyway, and I stepped up with my hair all blown out everywhere and said, ‘Dad, does that mean I don’t get a haircut again this week?’
“That game warden just said, ‘##LL,’ threw the fish back in the box, and walked off the boat,” said Robby with obvious delight.
“One time, when I was 16 or 17, I went out with Dad, and we were fishing right on the legal line of the water. I made enough money in three 20-minute tows, and we were catching big shrimp, to buy my first car. I paid cash for it, but days like that are few and far between.
“He paid me 25 percent of the boat after fuel and expenses, and I had enough to buy that car—it was a ’62 Fairlane.”
At that moment, the front door of the museum opened, and in walked ex-game warden John Feist. Broad smiles spread across the faces of both men, and Robby said, “He’s an old game warden, he knows,” and both men broke into a hearty laugh.
“Those were the good times, weren’t they,” said John with a laugh.
“Well, I enjoyed it,” responded Robby. “They got me for oystering one time and for dragging on the beach at night.”
“That was way up on the beach, too,” laughed John. “I was sitting there looking at the radar, and I said, ‘There’s another boat coming.’ It was a car!” John exclaimed. “They were so close to shore the radar picked up the car lights. It was crazy times.”
“I’ve never had a job I enjoyed more,” stated Robby. “My grandfather said, ‘You find something you enjoy, and that’s your job.’ Every day was an adventure; you never knew what was around the next bend.
“His job was to catch us,” Robby said, pointing to John with a laugh, “and our job was to get away.”
“I was coming out of Seabrook one time about two o’clock in the morning with all the lights out, trying to find them,” said John. “I didn’t want anyone to see me coming, and they’ve got their lights off, so I can’t see them.
“That was before we had radar, and I’m trying to find them. I’d look off and see a light, and all of a sudden, it would go off and come back on, and I knew a boat had gone between us.
“I’d shine my light, and it would bounce off the cables, and I thought, ‘I’ve got ‘em now,’” he laughed. “How we avoided running over each other is amazing.
“Back then, we had CB radios, and you would hear them say, ‘I think the starfish are out here.’ We were the starfish,” said John, pointing to his badge with a grin.
The two men shared several more minutes of genuine camaraderie, reminiscing over old times before John headed for home.
After he left, Robby said he had nothing bad to say about any of the game wardens.
“They had their job, and we had ours. That’s the way it was back then, and that’s the way I looked at it. It was our job to catch what we could and get in with it, and if we couldn’t, we threw it overboard.
“I loved every minute of that life. I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” said Robby, sighing, as if his memories had sparked a longing to be at it again.
Editor’s note: If you would like to read the first part of this series, click here: