The Mystery of Mystery
by Jan Edwards
We who live
down along the San Bernard - and, indeed, the
Brazosport area are truly blessed with a plethora of
historical and mysterious things, happenings and
people. If you stand in one place long enough, you
can almost feel the mystery begin to seep into your
body through osmosis. Have you ever passed by the
shrimp boat, the Mystery, off of
Highway 288 in Freeport, Texas and wondered about
her – why she is there, what her name signifies?
But there are no signs telling why the boat sits
there. It’s all just a mystery.
But if you are lucky and look real
hard when you are in the Freeport Tourist Bureau
office, you might find a black and white Xeroxed
pamphlet about the boat. Below, is the meat of that
brochure, written in the words of the wife of the
last Captain of the boat.
“Her name
is Mystery. Forty tons of wood, iron
and rigging, tired and battle scarred from hard work
and high seas, proud nose still held high, she looks
eager to return to the warm Gulf waters which were
her home for 28 years. But the old lady is retired.
A career of hard work in which she outlived most of
her sisters ended when her abandoned hull was lifted
from the mud of the Brazos harbor channel, cleaned,
repaired, fitted out in the trappings of her youth
and put on permanent display on brick pedestals as a
monument to the men and boats who pioneered the
shrimping industry of the Texas Gulf Coast. After a
lifetime of hard work, little prestige and no
glamour, the Mystery is destined to
become one of the best known, most photographed and
most viewed fishing boats in the world. From her
pedestal you can see the harbor water of her most
frequent and last home – Freeport, Texas.
She was
born in 1940. Her origin was a cypress swamp. Her
maker was a bayou boat builder names S. Klonaris,
who had set up shop on the Louisiana coast. He
produced vessels for the men who saw in the early
stages of shrimp harvesting the makings of a
substantial industry serving a worldwide market.
Mystery was fashioned out of cypress wood
by craftsmen who could curve and fit a plank to the
sweep of a hull by eyeball measurement. Some 60 feet
in overall length, she was one of the breed of
trawlers which were to pioneer the shrimping
industry – to transform a now-and-then,
catch-as-catch can business, into a consistent
professional enterprise to serve a growing market.
There was never anything glamorous about the
Mystery. Wide-hulled and solid, she was
designed for strength and reliability. She carried
bunks and stores for a crew of three, with all
remaining space devoted to the task of harvesting,
cleaning and storing Gulf Coast shrimp.
Mystery’s
first owner was The Trawling Company, at
Berwick, Louisiana, where she was the pride and joy
of shrimping’s pioneers. In many ways, she was one
of the first of a new breed of trawlers, designed to
go further out into the Gulf, fish deeper waters and
catch bigger shrimp.
People in the industry came from all
over the area to take a look, when Klonaris, who was
known along the waterfront simply as ‘The Greek’,
delivered her. More than 60 feet long topside, with
a deck 17 feet wide and gross weight of 43 tons, she
was the ‘top of the line’.
The
Trawling Company
named her MYSTERY saying it was a
mystery as to how they were going to pay for her.
They tended toward colorful names. Some of her
sister vessels in a company fleet of 21 boats
carried names like Request, Desire,
Bounty, Surprise, Memory,
Secret, and Mutiny.
The Mystery was
immediately put to work to pay for her keep. Her 100
horsepower ‘oil screw’ diesel pushing her through
the Gulf waters as far out as the 20-fathoms curve
in search of the sea’s ranking delicacy – shrimp.
She ranged
from the Mississippi line to the tip of Texas,
staying out a week or more at a time. On good trips
she would bring back more than 100 barrels of headed
shrimp weighing 125 pound a barrel. When the fishing
was poor she might carry only 10 barrels. There was
no ‘average’ catch. It was always feast or famine in
the shrimp harvesting business.
IF A ‘CARRIED CATCH’ COULD BE
COMPUTED FOR THE MYSTERY, IT WOULD
PROBABLY AMOUNT TO SOMETHING LIKE THREE AND A
HALF MILLION POUNDS OF SHRIMP.
She was one of the first boats in the
shrimp fleets to carry a radiotelephone. It was a
15-watt apparatus, very useful for talking between
boats – if they weren’t too far apart. It had about
a tenth the output power of modern communications
systems used in shrimping today. Mystery’s
call letters were WC4208.
For 10
years Mystery fished for The
Trawling Company and its affiliate companies.
During much of that time her captain was Edmond
Kiffe, who finally bought the boat from the company
in 1950 and was the owner until 1964, when he sold
to Paul T. Romero. Her last Captain was Billy Larry
Ledet, who fished the veteran boat off Freeport in
her final seasons as a trawler.
Somewhat battered now, by a lifetime
of rough weather and pounding seas,
Mystery was still a capable boat. She
could still bring in a catch from far out, and she
could still haul a full load. Repairs were becoming
more and more regular in occurrence with her
advancing age, but she was still a reliable working
craft. What was overtaking her now, more than old
age, was obsolescence. Once the undisputed queen of
the Gulf fleet, Mystery was now just
‘another old wood-hull working the near shore
waters’.
In her youth she had been a big boat.
But now, in Freeport and elsewhere along the coast,
they were building another new breed - - boats of
steel, twice the length of Mystery and
capable of cruising with ease all over the Gulf,
capable of staying at sea much longer, capable of
going to the best catches wherever they were, and
with such innovations as on-board packing and
freezing apparatus and refrigerated holds.
Mystery and her kind had been outdistanced.
By the age of 25, she was an old
lady.
Some old shrimp boats were eventually
run aground. Some faced one storm too many and are
beyond salvage. Some go to parts for other boats,
and a few wind up on the ocean floor. Many of them,
though, when their productive lives are over, are
simply abandoned. The day came for Mystery
when her latest trip was her last trip, when it
simply wasn’t feasible to take her out again.
THE MYSTERY’S CARRIER
AS A WORKING SHRIMP BOAT ENDED QUIETLY.
Tired and
battered, all salvageable fixtures removed, she was
tied up at the dock of a Freeport riverfront firm
and, as dock charges exceeded her value, abandoned.
Her hull was taking water through several loose
seams, and she settled into the mud of the river
bottom.
Could this be the sad end for MYSTERY
?
Fate, in the form of an idea,
stepped in at that point......
To be continued.....
