The Hislers of Oak Island

“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 grandad 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 about 1970. I had three uncles on my dad’s side that 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.” Besides being a fisherman, Billy was also a tugboat captain. 

“Before we moved here, I remember coming in the sixties and spending three months gill netting down on Bolivar Island for speckled trout and red fish. 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 about 1969-70. They still did a little gill netting in the bay and they still do, 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 3-4 inches, whatever size 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.” “I remember seine fishing,” interjected Susan Bollich. “Same thing,” said Bill, “The net would be about 900-feet-long with corks on the top and weights on the bottom. It would be piled ten feet high on the back of the boat It was just a long net, and you’d string it out and wrap the fish up then pull it onto the shore. Whoever’s around and wants to lean on the net, just start pulling on it, and puling on it, and pulling on it,” laughed Bill. “Nobody wanted the farthest post,” laughed Susan, ”but we loved doing it.” “You would also get in a boat and get behind them and make noise, banging on the side of the boat, to keep them from going back in that direction,” added Bill, “You’d just keep pushing them towards the shore 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-foot long.” “Pogie boats were smaller boats put out by the 150-foot-long larger vessel to circle the schools of fish with nets,” added George. “The nets would then be pulled to the larger boat where a hose would be lowered to suck the fish into the boat. They were a really oily fish and the oil would be used to make things like WD40, make-up, dietary supplements, etc.,” he explained. “Dad restructured the pogie boat with decking and cabin and re-fitted 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” cause 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.” 

“Fishermen are just like farmers,” George continued, “they burn the candle at both ends, getting up by 4:00 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 5:00 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 ‘til 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 not pull a net. Back then, a few hundred to five hundred pounds of shrimp was normal, a 300-hundred-pound day was average, a thousand pounds would be a good day. Back then they were worth more than they are now. The average then was $2.00-$2.50 a pound off the boat, the bigger ones would bring $3.00-$3.50. But the money was there at $2.00 a pound and fuel was between 50 and 80 cents a gallon. If we burned eighty gallons in a day it was a lot.” “And everything was seasonal,” added George, “you weren’t shrimping all year long.” “At the end of the day we headed for the fish house, in the early days the Kreuzer’s 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, run them up, weighed them, fuel up and put ice back on the boat to get ready for the next day and do it again. You’d patch on your net, work on whatever’s broken, cause there’s always something,” explained Bill”

“When I started snapper fishing,” noted George, “there was a hand-crank set-up, using a bigger reel that held five to six hundred feet of line, because you’re fishing in a hundred plus feet of water. 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,” interjected Bill. “Yes, whatever they could build” said George with a chuckle. “Or probably hand-lined, they hand-lined for a long time,” he added. “The Vietnamese still hand-line,” added Bill, “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 100-200 pounds, swordfish can be up to 500 pounds.”  “I don’t think there’s too many of them that hand-line now,” added George, “but there’s some that still do.” “I’ve seen them hand-line some big fish,” said Bill, “I have a lot of respect for them, they’re some hard workers,” he noted with obvious admiration. “An average day for us would be about a thousand pounds of snapper,” said Bill. “They travel in schools but for the most part they like to bunch up on structure, valves, rocks, reeves, anything sticking up, they’re considered a reef fish,” he noted. 

“In the late 80s, I worked for my brother, Randy,” continued Bill. “He had The 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 fisherman. They eat their fish and destroy their gear. Bill said they will also eat their shrimp, including the net. There is no way of knowing they are in the area until they start trying to pull in their catch and see the damage. 

“I once caught an 800-pound swordfish when I was fishing with my brother, Randy,” stated Bill. “That was when we were long lining, laying out sixty miles of trot line with 1,000 hooks. We did that in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, and it would take us about eight hours to lay the line and about twenty four hours to pick it back up,” said Bill. “Randy took a boat to the west coast one time and they had two 60-mile spools. 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,” declared Bill. “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,” said George, returning to the topic of long-lining. “Today, they usually only lay down about twenty miles of line using 500-600 pound test on a three foot diameter spool,” he added.

“There was a lot of outlaw fishing going on,” noted George, “shrimping after dark, bringing in more than your allowable catch, shrimping too close to shore, you could get a fine, or have your catch confiscated, or your boat, or be taken to jail.” “I’ve had a few loads taken,” confessed Bill. “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,” stated George. “I keep the laws, but snapper fishing is different than shrimping,” he clarified.

“When I was fifteen to eighteen years of age I would work on several different boats jumping from one to another, working as a deckhand. 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. He then moved the restaurant to Anahuac in the location where the Italian restaurant is now. 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,” added Bill. “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,” added George, “where 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,” surmised George. “Remember, shrimp was going for $2.50-$3.00 in the bay, after they began importing it has dropped to a dollar a pound today, to the boats. That, plus over-fishing beginning in ’75 affected the shrimping industry. In 2006, dad bought the Dereks Pride from Bob Smalley, who lived in Liberty, and converted it to a snapper boat.”  

The father-son duo told how the NOAA fisheries changed the red snapper program over to a quota system in 2007. They said in the 90s NOAA began the log book program. Each boat had to have a permit and a log book associated with that permit. “It was then that I began running the Dereks Pride for dad, he was still running the Edna. 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 down,” explained George. “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.  The snapper was the only fish under the quota system, except for the 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.”  

“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 sapper 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.” 

“The Dereks Pride was not the best boat. It was built with a flat bottom with a tunnel hull for the wheel, so you could get in shallower water with it,” George said. “It was not deep-sea worthy,” interjected Bill. “As a matter of fact, it got dangerous.” “Once we were in the beginning of the ten-day season and had already made two trips,” said George. “Two cold fronts had already come through and there was a pattern of three. The third one was coming and 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 would not give enough time to go out and get another catch.  Dad was like, ‘Let’s go catch some fish, nobody’s waiting!’ so I headed back out. I get out there and started fishing and got almost our limit of 2,000 pounds, but it started getting rough. We were anchored up at night and we had ten foot seas. The waves started coming up and hitting the side of the boat and one wave came over and knocked J.C., my sixty some year old hand, off his feet and across the deck. We all decided we were done, so we got the fish put up, the hatches secured and went in the cabin to lay down and wait it out, we wake up in the middle of the night and the anchor line had broke. The boat was drifting and we now have 15-16-foot seas. I’ve been in some rough stuff, but this was the roughest I’d been in. I usually shut the boat down at night, but for some reason I had left it running, so I went to the wheel and started heading towards Freeport, I was done. Freeport is normally a six-hour-ride from where I was at, about twenty miles offshore. The seas are now at 17-18-foot swells, and that is nasty and dangerous.  Usually a good swell takes about ten seconds for you to get from the trough to the crest and back to the trough, these were taking five seconds. You go up and get dropped and head into the next one, and then you have the cross waves bouncing off the bulkhead. The outriggers were out with these types of stabilizers, we call them birds that catch the water to keep you from pitching and rolling from side to side so bad. When I came up it jerked with the wave action three times really hard. On the third time it snapped the rope, and the chain with the big metal ring catches the block. I still had my stabilizer at that time but a couple more hard jerks and the big metal ring collapses and goes through the block and the boat came up so high on that side because of the big waves that it almost rolled me over. It threw me off the wheel and I’m lying on the side door of the cabin like it was the floor. I thought the boat was going to roll over, and I’m surprised it didn’t. It did that twice, before I could get back up on the wheel. I turned straight into the big waves, cause you have to at that point, I had no choice.   Luckily, the small waves are hitting me on the opposite side and they’re helping me stay upright. About three knots was all I could do and I just remember for about 16 hours I stayed on the wheel, fighting it, but thank God I was headed north northeast which put me dead in on the end of the Galveston jetties. But it took me forever to get there, I could have been into 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 so scared, except for one of my deck hands who had been with me for about ten years. After the stabilizer broke he was right there with me the whole time. That woke them all up; they thought we were going down at that point. I was scared, I knew there were twenty foot waves at its peak,” described George. “I downplayed it,” said Bill, “because I was on the Edna and do it all the time, but I didn’t realize how un-seaworthy his boat was in high seas.” “He called to check on me the next day and asked where I was. I told him Galveston, we almost died, you told me to go out and we almost died,” exclaimed George who was able to laugh about it after the fact. “It still didn’t stop me from going out and staying out in rough weather, I just learned to work smarter and not harder. I would listen constantly to the weather station and move closer, within ten miles of the shore if the weather got too rough. I’m very thankful that I haven’t had anything worse than that,” said George with genuine relief.  

To be continued next month