I've got family that lives around Savannah, Georgia, in the Southeast US. When I was a kid we'd go to see them quite often. It was about a three hour trip so we would make a weekend of it.
The family we most often stayed with lived outside Richmond Hill somewhere on a country road. They had a boy, Robert, who was my age and another cousin who was always there when we came, Elton, was about my brother's age.
We would strike out in the mornings with nothing particular in mind to do. We usually had at least one rifle or shotgun with us. There were feral hogs and other nasty critters in the area. Eastern diamondbacks, timber rattlers, copperheads and cottonmouths were really more of a concern than anything else.
The most dangerous thing that I remember coming across was a golden orb spider on her web stretched across a fire break which we were traversing. I had not seen but one of two of these before. The web was incredibly large and complex and I noticed that it had a lightning bolt emblazened on it. I later found that this is the signature of the species.
Image by Justin Cobb from Pixabay
I think that the best times, though, were at Savage Island.
We would go there on Labor Day weekend and camp out but the main reason to go was to catch shrimp and crabs.
The incoming tide would bring shrimp up the river. The water would seemingly boil as the mass of shrimp tightened up into a bait ball to confuse would be predators. That was where we would throw our casting nets.
I hear that Elton now throws a 12' net and that it flairs out into a perfect circle. That wasn't the case when we were boys.
The men went out when the tide was coming in. They caught whatever was the limit at the time and would come in. Then we all stand around and clean the shrimp.
Some were kept as boiling shrimp so all we had to do to this was to pinch off their heads. The ones that were to used for frying or anything else also had to be peeled and deveined. This was a tedious process but the rewards were well worth it. The worst part was that shrimp have sharp horns that will stick you if you're not paying attention.
When we got done with that, us boys would had out in the boat for a little action of our own.
The tide would be going down by the time we got out on the creek so we mostly cast in tidal pools. We didn't cast very well. Most of the time our nets made a "D" in the water rather than a circle. If we came back in with a gallon of shrimp, we thought that we'd done something. We netted squid, cuttlefish, mullet and sheep's head too. Whatever was unlucky enough to get in the boat made it back to shore.
For us it was more about the adventure than actually catching shrimp. We always came back muddy because the boat would get stuck and we'd have to push it back out. More than one of us fell out of the boat. And we'd usually come back bloody from getting scraped on oyster bars.
Those were great times. Those are memories which I hold dear.
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