Under The Sun

Sandy Salinas is a lifelong resident of Homestead.  Her grandmother, Louise Harris, ran a fishing camp next door to Alabama Jack’s in the 1950′s and 1960′s.  Harris told her granddaughter that she was one of the first licensed female boat captains in the country.  Here are excerpts from a conversation with Salinas about her grandmother:

“She was originally from Philadelphia.  Her family lived in a log cabin in Homestead near Avocado Street.

“Later, when she married my grandfather, they opened a fish camp.  They were one of the first ones.  There were three at the time, I think.  It was a quaint place with an outhouse.  At the time, they had to actually get water brought in.  They didn’t have running water because it was right next to the ocean.  They had a lot of people that would come there. People would go on the charter boats, have lobster or crab for dinner.  They also served alcohol.  I remember they had some dancing, like a jukebox.  I remember dancing with my brothers.

“With the mosquitoes and the heat, she decided it wasn’t a great place to have children. So, she took a boat and she went back to Philadelphia and had her children there.   She was back and forth many times.

“She loved the water and she saw it as a challenge to take the [captain's] test.  She had a natural knack for finding her way around the ocean.  She made little fishing skiffs and lobster traps by hand. She was very handy, a master carpenter. She was also very knowledgeable about different knots.  She used to show me and my brothers different styles of knots.  She learned all that. She and my father knew any fish in the ocean.”

“She would take people out to the ocean.  She would do the deep-ocean fishing so they would get sailfish.  I have a picture of when she took my mother out and my mother caught one.  When you catch a sailfish, you have to hold on to it or they don’t record it as you having caught it.  My grandmother wouldn’t help my mother because she said ‘You won’t be recorded as catching it if I help you.” My mother had a hard time, but she finally reeled it in.

“We would go down there [to the fish camp] on the weekends and we would bring back lobster and crabs.  I have memories of my dad sitting there at the kitchen table cracking the crabs on a piece of newspaper and eating them–he loved the blue crab.  They were abundant. I remember big pots of lobster almost every weekend.”

“I remember Alabama Jack’s.  I remember that it used to be pretty busy-there were a lot of people there too.  I remember walking up and down the street, going by the place. My grandmother used to talk to [the owners] a lot and I remember when my grandmother died, she had a burial at sea.  We went from there out to sea and we were talking to the people at Alabama Jack’s and they were very concerned.  In fact, they probably did come to the funeral.

“She was 81 [when she died].  It was a rough way of living—exposed to the sun, going out in the water every day.  She took that test every year until a year or two before her death.  Every single year she got her license renewed.”