Community
Ranger - A catboat story
File Photo -
Cayman Cat Boat
By Carley Ebanks and H.E. Ross
A year ago, not too many people were thinkingabout Cayman Maritime History, especially among the middle agegroup to whom that special relationship with the sea that theirfathers had no longer directly related to them.
Now, with their children approaching adulthood and seeking a moralplatform with which to launch their lives, those same Caymaniansare remembering what before were just stories that made the veryfibre of their own existence.
The strengths, practicality and passion of their ancestors weresomehow televisionised, a sort of screen of materialism separatedthem from a source of ingenuity that created legends about thepeople of these tiny Islands. Throughout the Caribbean Basin,Caymanian sailors and their ships were celebrated on an elitescale. Those stories are important.
The following is excepted and re-edited from the upcoming CaymanMariner Series book, "Cayman Turtler". The story istold by one of the most successful Turtle Rangers in the lastdays of Cayman turtling.
In 1941, the year I went and joined the Navy, it was the sameyear the schooner Majestic got lost out in the Cays in a hurricane.My wife lost a brother, two uncles, I don't know how many cousins.
My father and one of my brothers , some cousins, they were allon her. My father launched a Catboat off the vessel and they gotto this cay, the Sererras. The next morning, the vessel was gonewith 28 people. That was a terrible thing.
For 10 years, nobody would fish on the cay. From '41 to '51 ,people from Providence Island, they would fish Hawksbills there.But no Caymanians would fish there. Superstitious, I guess.
I took some time off from a company I was working for in Aruba,an oil company. I said, I'm going to take a trip around there.I want to go back and do some turtling. I got two boats, two crews.I had a hard time persuading the owner of the boat to put me there.He was superstitious too, but he was a good turtler and a goodcaptain. He captained a vessel named the Antares and he took usthere. Captain McSherry Ebanks. I persuaded him, my good old friend.He finally said, "If you want to go, I'll take you.'
It was a twelve-week trip. Ten to twelve weeks was a normal trip.It can be shorter and some go out there for six months but theaverage would be between eight to twelve weeks. Well, later, CaptainMcSherry and Captain Allie both told me that that was the biggestand best Ranger trip that had been done in their memories. Itwas so much stuff there. The turtle, so many turtle and so manyshark. I think we had 441 shark skins. We had 186 turtle withtwo Catboats. I think the share was L63 Sterling.
In 1952, in January, I went down again. My father went with us,two of my brothers, one of my wife's uncles, two other friends,we went to the same cay, the Serreras. That was the year we hada terrible Nor'wester and we lost a couple of men out there, furtherSouth in the Miskito Cay area. It was more like a hurricane.
We got caught in it about 10 miles from the cay. We were on ourway to the nets but never did make it to the nets. That morning,the wind came in so sudden and so strong and with just the smallestpiece of sail we managed, I don't know how, to get back to thecay.
I had a compass and my brother was the captain on that other boat.I have never seen weather like that in my life. And we were ina Catboat. I still think about it, how good those Catboats reallywere. My boat, the one I was on, belonged to McSherry, was a bigboat, it was twenty-four foot long. But the one my brothers werein, she was only, I think, nineteen or twenty foot. They saidthat we must have had a wind of around ninety miles an hour. ButI know that the sea was something that I could not imagine couldbe in a common Nor'wester. I found out then how good these Catboatsreally were.
Luckily, I had that compass and I took a bearing when we weregoing out, so we were able to set to the bearing and maintainthat. We finally got in sight of the cay.
Well, it got cut down so bad, we were all buried up and couldhardly see where we were going. We could only use a part of apiece of the jib; that was all. My father was cook with us andhe was on the cay, and that was the same cay he had survived inë41 from the Majestic.
He said he was going crazy, he was walking up and down from oneend of that cay to the other, looking for us, and worried andall. He said, being on the cay like that he classified that weatherlike the one with the Majestic, and he had experienced many, manyterrible hurricanes, but he said that was a bad piece of weather.They were terrible seas, you were looking straight up at them.
A couple of days after that the Antares came out from MiskitoCays to see how we were. They brought us the news that some ofguys were lost over there, three guys off one boat. And, one ofthe guys that was lost had survived with my father on this cayfrom the Majestic. They said that one of the banana boats fromNicaragua or Costa Rica had lost her pilot house to the wind,that was how strong the wind was there. And most of those boatscould handle bad weather.