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Captain E rnest ‘Bud’ G eorge, born and reared
in W ilmington on the M asonboro Sound
near W hisky C reek, has been shrimping and
fishing since age 7. H is father, he says, was
the saltiest of O ld Salts. A longside the creek,
down on the sound, M onroe ‘T ucker’ G eorge owned T rail’s E nd
R estaurant from 1945 to 1958. T ucker G eorge supplied most of
the seafood for the restaurant and kept Bud busy shucking oysters
and peeling shrimp before the dinner crowd arrived.
G rowing up on the sound surrounded by watermen offered
young G eorge a taste of what he could never quite get enough of.
“I didn’t go far in school,” he says. “T hey didn’t teach me
what I wanted to know. I wanted to know the water and they
couldn’t tell me about that.”
G eorge started working on shrimp boats when he got out of
the service in 1958, and he hasn’t been off a boat since.
For more than 20 years, he worked for boat C aptain E ddy
H aneman and later Beverly ‘B.C .’ C ostin, local shrimping figureheads
at the docks beyond H ieronymous Brothers fish house
on A irlie R oad, where the Fish M arket restaurant is today.
A s a deck hand on H aneman’s and C ostin’s boats, G eorge
travelled north to the shrimp-rich Pamlico Sound and south to
Florida, often staying on the boat for up to seven days at a time.
L ater, G eorge took a leap and became the captain of his own
boat, a 37-foot shrimper. H e named the boat Miss Dorothy
after the “biggest catch of his life,” his wife, D orothy G eorge.
A board Miss Dorothy with one other mate, G eorge was able
to make a fine living selling shrimp caught from the mouth of
the C ape Fear south to H olden Beach. O ut for less than twelve
hours at a time, he sold to local residents and restaurants.
“T here’s no comparison to the way it was back then,” G eorge
says. T here were thirty-five shrimp boats parked at the drawbridge
at W rightsville, hundreds at Southport alone, not to
A bove: Bud George skins a dolphin (mahi-mahi) at the Wrightsville
Beach Municipal Dock for his dad’s charter fishing business in the
1960s. Photo by Fred Pickler. Opposite: John Broome and Julian
A nderson haul in the nets with a hydraulic wench.
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