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Because the resident fleet did not
include a shrimp boat, Cordy traveled to
Sneads Ferry to purchase fresh shrimp.
He bought 300 pounds that first week-end,
but sales were poor.
“We just barely did sell them. I
thought we were going to have
to eat some of them,” he recalls.
Soon the Hieronymus broth-ers
began to diversify, each find-ing
his niche.
“Each one of us had a little
job. Harvey, my twin brother,
kind of ran things. He was pretty
much the manager. Glenn . . .
was an asset that we couldn’t have
done without. When he was flying
for Piedmont, he would get off a
plane — whether it was Chicago,
Philadelphia or New York — and
run around with a clipboard trying to
develop markets for the seafood we caught
here. That gave us a shot in the arm,
market wise. We didn’t have to compete
with the local area. That was better for
us. We ended up buying a tractor trailer,
and we trucked things to New York and
Philadelphia, and that was Glenn and
Harvey,” Cordy says.
Cordy and George worked the supply
end of the business, heading out to sea.
Cordy captained a progression of three
boats. The last of which, Hieronymus III,
was a 75-foot, 103-ton trawler that he
picked up in Aransas Pass, Texas, near
Corpus Christi.
“I fished down in the Gulf around
these rigs, the drilling rigs down there,
then I brought it up here, and if I didn’t
have close to 4,000 pounds a week,
it was a bad week, and that was just
shrimp. Along with shrimp, I’d have
800, 900 to 1,000 pounds of flounder,
spots — a seafood platter. There were
two or three other trawlers doing the
same thing.”
The shrimp harvest was in the sum-mertime,
from late June through early
September, and often, Cordy says, they
sold out of shrimp by Sunday at noon.
“Most of the shrimpers would leave
at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning and
get back at 4 o’clock in the afternoon,
unload their stuff that day, re-ice and
go back out the next morning,” Cordy
says. “I would leave Sunday night and
stay out until Friday and
come back in. The reason
I didn’t come in and go
out every day was because
to get from the fishing
grounds to the dock was
a seven to eight hour trip
if you were off Morehead. So
I would stay out there most of the time,
tow around the clock.”
Shrimp are caught inside a mile from
shore with two 75-foot, cone-shaped
parachute nets stored on deck. Each net,
cabled to outriggers, has wooden doors
that when thrown overboard, are pitched
open and held open by the water cur-rent.
The doors drag the net along the
ocean bottom.
“We would tow for two hours. Every
two hours, we pulled the nets up, dump
what was in there, separate what the
catch was. Shrimping was a vacation
to me because it was easier work, the
weather was much better,” Cordy says.
In September, the shrimp nets would
come off, and the boat would be rigged
for fishing trout, croakers and floun-der.
The Hieronymus boys would
head north, working out of Ocracoke,
Wanchese and often up into the
Chesapeake.
“That’s where the real money was
made, but you earned it,” Cordy says.
“September, October, November,
December, January — up in the north
Atlantic, it was a different story, bad
weather, ice on the deck. I’ve stepped
on the deck and slid all the way to the
stern.”
“I’d call the fish house, and at the
time we had a tractor trailer, and Harvey
would dispatch the tractor trailer to
Morehead or to Wanchese, wherever I
was going to unload. We would pay the
fish house so much, per 100 weight for
their ice, and throw them on our truck.
Glenn had scattered out markets all over
the Eastern United States, and while
I was on the way in, Harvey or Glenn
would get on the phone and try and get
rid of these fish before I got to the dock.
So when the truck met me at the dock,
the truck knew where to go. It was a
well-coordinated, profitable effort for a
long period of time.”
Cordy says, “things were booming for
a long time. It was a good way to make
an honest living. Then the fuel issues
started, and operating costs started to
go up, real estate in that area — people
didn’t want to see stinky old trawlers
anymore — they wanted condos there.
We just kind of bowed out of it grace-fully,”
leaving local stories and memories
that will live forever.
Below: George Hieronymus pictured
in 1977 with a boatload of trout
from the Outer Banks that probably
went in to Etheridge Seafood in
Wanchese. Right: Hieronymus
Brothers II rigged for shrimping.