The Hislers of Oak Island ~ Part Two

“I was headed off shore the day before Allison hit in 2001,” stated Bill. “The next morning I’m probably 70-80 miles out headed to a specific spot. By the time I got out 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 hundred 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 thirty miles out and it comes up to about twenty foot of water. When I got into the Hill Bank the seas were twenty foot in twenty foot of water. It was hairy, we were going with the wind and it took us ten 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 chuckled. 

“I was headed out from Galveston one evening to fish,” said Bill. “We came through the jetties, which are about two miles long, and turned south, heading toward the Candy Stripe. It was a rig, twenty miles out, or so, painted red and white all the way up the tower and fishing was pretty good there,” noted Bill. “I had a plotter on my boat which draws a line as you travel. We got out there and it was rough, I mean it was right at the point where you shouldn’t do it, you didn’t need to be there really, but we were desperate, trying to make money. It was me and one guy and we get out there and get all the doors open and are ready to start towing and I was feeling bad. I felt okay going out, but the further we got offshore, I mean it was rough, by the time I got ready to fish I was feeling really sick, I must have picked up a bug. I started fishing and I just couldn’t do it. I don’t ever lie down, never have, I just push on through, but this time I just couldn’t. I told the boy, ‘bring everything back in, we’re going in, I just can’t do it, I’m too sick.’ So, I turned us around and we’re twenty miles out, you’re talking about eight knots, almost a three hour run from where we were going to fish. I had it on the plotter all the way out there and I had the radar for nighttime working. So I set everything up for the boy, I told him to follow the plot line and he’d been on the radar enough times, he knew how to use it, and I went to lie down. The plotter uses a dot system, it takes a reading every so often and draws a line to plot your course. Well, when it took a reading it set a dot on one side of the jetty and one on the other, which was around the bend and plotted the course straight across it. I usually lie down for thirty minutes then get back up, but this time when I lay down I was out. I never do that! The next thing I knew, I was on the floor, and I knew something bad had just happened, you don’t get knocked in the floor unless it’s something bad. Sure enough, he followed the plot lines right across that jetty. It was rough and high tide and the south wind just pushed the water up and it was breaking over and covering the jetty. My first thought was we had hit a ship. I jumped up and ran up to the wheel and knocked him back. The motor is still wide open and we’re sitting up on top of these rocks, you don’t get off that, that’s it, your boat’s done. I looked to the right and the doors are out there and I saw the waves breaking and my knees just went weak and I though, life jacket! I slowed the boat down and took it out of gear and thought, I wonder if the prop will turn backwards I can at least try and get off, so I put it in reverse. The waves would come up and hit the boat and then a big wave hit and I felt a bump and it inched back about an inch. I thought, ‘holy moly’ just maybe I can get it off of here. It did it three more times and each time I felt in inch back, then the fourth time it just turned loose and came off. It was half way on the jetty but the waves were so high and the wind and I was able to get it off and not put a big hole in my boat, it pushed the front in like an accordion though. When I finally got it off I backed it up to a safe distance and thought, I’ve got to have a hole in my boat. I backed it up a pretty good ways in case I had to drop anchor and work on it, I didn’t want it near the rocks. I told the boy, ‘you go down there and see if there’s any water coming in the boat, hurry!’ I had to hang onto the wheel cause the wind was still blowing and I had to keep it away from the rocks. It seemed like a long period of time to me that he was gone but I couldn’t leave and check. Finally, he appeared and just stood there looking at me. I said, ‘well?’ He responded, ‘well what?’ I said is there water coming in the boat,” exclaimed Bill agitatedly. “He said, ‘yup,’ I said HOW MUCH water son, is it a bunch, can you stick your finger in it, what’s the deal? He thought a minute and said yeah, you can stick your finger in it,” laughed Bill recalling his frustration. “I knew if that was all it was we could make it in. That was pretty scary. My brother Randy’s boat the Prowler, was on the rocks once and it went down. It was anchored on the north side around ’85 and we had a norther come in. It wasn’t supposed to hit that night, it was supposed to hit the next day. That sun came up and the wind was blowing 25-30 mph. That’s not super strong but these little anchors in the situation he was in, don’t hold that well. I was okay cause I was anchored out in the Edna and could just ride it out. Randy had a crew member who had woke up and he was at the wheel of the Prowler, he was paying attention. He radioed that they were fine. Thirty minutes to an hour later I hear my brother Randy come on the radio screaming. The crew member, after he said they were fine, went back to bed! The Prowlerwas about two hundred tons of boat not counting the fuel. The wind caught it and pushed it up on the jetty and messed his rudder up, once you mess up the rudder and the wheel, that’s it, you’re not moving. It knocked a couple holes in it and the boat went down,” said Bill softly. The coast guard came out and rescued the crew. The Glass family of Oak Island had a bulk heading company at the time, and they went out there after it had calmed down, welded the hatches shut, put a hose in and pumped air into the boat, pushing the water out and floated it up. Randy had insurance on the boat but it took a year to restore it.” 

“Another occasion was an all-night affair in the mid-nineties,” continued Bill, “I was eighty miles offshore and I’m snapper fishing by now, with a crew of five. It was rough with ten-to-fifteen-foot seas, but it was a ten-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 a while. 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 by 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,” laughed Bill. “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 motor, no lights, no generator, no power, just 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,” said son, George, “you couldn’t stop; you had to feed your family. You never got ahead, even now, I’m not ahead,” declared George. 

 “I wish I had a picture of it,” Bill 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 twenty 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 Louis Pass, heading towards the jetties is a three or four 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 ten thousand 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 thirty grand that week, cause I went back out and got another nine thousand 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 thirty thousand pounds and that was three-ten hours nights in July. They were pretty shrimp too, they weren’t the great big ones but they were large and we got eighty cents a pound for them, and it wasn’t enough money, 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 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.” 

“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 in 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 of 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 and 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.”

“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 and 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 he found a flounder. He found a little old flounder,” laughed Robby recalling the incident, “and he picked it up and he 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 and 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,’ and threw the fish back in the box and walked off the boat,” said Robby with obvious delight. 

“One time, when I was sixteen or seventeen, I went out with dad, and we were fishing right on the legal line of the water. I made enough money in three twenty-minute tows, and we were catching big shrimp, to buy my first car, paid cash for it, but days like that are few and far between. He paid me twenty-five 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,” laughed John. “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, and 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, ‘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 love every minute of that life, I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” sighed Robby as his memories sparked a longing to be at it again.