Chapter 23 Carl Winner – Long Ago and Far Away
Carolina Beach Harbor
1927, and the living was high, wide, and handsome. Lindbergh flew the Atlantic (it hadn’t been done before); Ernest Hemingway had just come forth with his first major literary effort as a struggling young American writer living in Paris, “The Sun Also Rises” the stock market crash was two luxuriant years away; the term flapper” was in vogue and aptly described the young ladies of the times; the immortal Babe swatted sixty home runs for the Yankees; and the upstate tourists were pouring into Carolina Beach like it wouldn’t be there in 1928.
On the periphery of these times was another noteworthy achievement – a headboat fishing dynasty was being born at Carolina Beach. Paint a picture in your mind’s eye of a healthy, flamboyant young man in his mid-teens. Put behind him a background of commercial fishing with nets for shad in the Cape Fear River and hard work in his tender years as a general helper aboard his father’s passenger and freight river boat. Give him credit as a young businessman selling peanuts aboard the Wilmington-Carolina Beach train that carried the good spirited, vacation bound passengers.
Wind up his mainspring as a helper with the family-owned concessions up on the beach business district. Top it off with a love for boats and fishing and having the skills to take a rowboat through the surf with some ease while headed out to sea. That was Carl Winner in 1927.
“I used to row our skiffs offshore and catch bottom fish – black bass, pigfish, red mouth, flounder, trout, sailors’ choice – to sell to the summer tourists,” Carl opened.
“Sometimes a person or two would ask to go along to have a go at the fishing themselves in return for pulling the anchor, and I’d give them a mess of fish when we got back to the hill.
“After a while I was doing so well, I started charging a dollar and a half for the trip. We didn’t take many because those boats were only twenty-two and twenty-four footers,” Carl added.
He occasionally used a sail to help him reach the offshore fishing grounds, but more often he rowed the boat with the long surf oars. But the ultimate answer lay just over the horizon – the first outboard motors.
“In the late 1920s the outboard motor seemed to be coming in style with the commercial fishermen from Seabreeze, who also fished off the south end of the boardwalk. And I bought one.
“However, it didn’t prove too practical, so I continued to row the skiff a few more trips until one day I saw another man go by in his boat with a Johnson Sea Horse. That seemed to work so well that I bought a fourteen-horse Johnson outboard. That was just about as fast as I ever rode in a boat,” Carl said.
“That engine inspired me, and I started building another boat – longer with a lot more beam for stability. By 1930 I had two or three of those surf boats with outboard motors, and business was great.
“By 1932 I started running a shuttle and transferring passengers out on the fishing grounds. We’d get a boat load out there fishing, and in another hour or so we’d collect the late arrivals and run them out there too. We’d bring in those who wanted to return then. An angler could fish several hours or so and come ashore with his string of bottom fish, or he could stay all day.
“We had some commercial fishermen from Seabreeze as guides aboard those fishing boats, because they had spent years learning where the offshore ledges and fishing holes were. There were Harper McQuillan, Benny Ross, Noah Futch, Oseola Freeman, and several others. These men could put you on the fish. They’d been rowing out to those rocks for years.
“That’s the way it all got started with the open boats launched through the surf and the outboard motors,” Carl said.
“When the stock market crashed in 1929, we cut the price from a dollar and a half to a dollar and a quarter; and that was the cost until we stopped fishing off there for the duration when World War II broke out.
“You could fish from early in the morning until dark, or you could come ashore. If you didn’t have all the fish you wanted, you could get a rain check; and next day you could go back out again free.”
There was no shortage of clients.
“We had plenty of tourists in those years starting with 1927. Of course the beach was crowded, and you could hardly find a place on the strand to stick a beach umbrella in the sand. The train from Wilmington stopped running in 1922, and after that the tourists drove down to the beach in their cars,” he said.
Sooner or later Carl had to expect competition; and he ultimately got it in the form of one Jake Faircloth, who put in an appearance at the south end of the boardwalk in 1935. Jake had a 1934 vintage car he traded to Carl for one of his boats and opened for business in 1936.
Carl says it was mostly a good humored joke. There was no real animosity.
“We’d drink beer together at night, and next morning we’d stand out there on the beach and try to steal each other’s customers. It was all in a jolly way, and I guess everybody in the country had a sense of humor during the 1930s,” Carl smiled.
“Jake and I never had any bad times against each other. There were plenty of fistfights during the winter offseason when we’d go to some beer joint and get back to
back and have fistfights with strangers, but we never fought each other.
“I remember one time Jake caught more fish than I did. Some people got to betting on shore. One fellow, Herman Hill, bet Cliff Smith ten dollars that my boat would catch more trout that night than Jake’s boat.
“All bets were covered, and we left in the late afternoon to run down to the trout grounds off Fort Fisher. Jake got his boat out beyond the sand bar, and, as usual, couldn’t get his motor started. He had gotten a new boat built by a house carpenter, and it had a low bow without any rake. It couldn’t ride the seas, so his motor would drown out more often when a sea hit him. He sat out there on the sand bar taking his motor down to dry so it would start.
“While he was working in the stern on that motor, his boat was drifting. He threw an anchor overboard. An anchor doesn’t hold so well unless it hooks into mud or in the rocks. His anchor finally grabbed when the boat drifted down the beach over some blue mud we had at that time – he was only about two hundred yards from where he’d started. To pacify the tourists on board while he took down the motor, he told them to start fishing.
“Meanwhile we had run our boat down the coast to the trout hole and fished all night. The bet was on the number of fish and not the pounds or size. We had a lot of nice, big gray trout. We returned and thought we’d won the money. We ran the boat up on the shore, and Jake was still out there with a drowned motor.
“They were fixing to pay off the bets, and Jake came pushing his boat ashore with an oar. We went over and looked inside his boat, and he had about four hundred trout – all of them about eight or nine inches long – that his people had caught in the mud. He had four times the trout we had, and we lost the bet,” Carl grinned.
The surf boats and later the cruisers fished regular spots in the ocean in those days. There was Flag Pond, a rock four miles off Wilmington Beach; Little House, so
named because an old-fashioned outhouse was located on a high sand dune and served as one of the two ranges on an offshore reef; 111 Rock, a place where the commercial
fishermen caught a hundred and eleven bunches of fish one time; Cylinder Head, an offshore reef named for a place where Jake Faircloth tore his motor down one time to dry it out and accidentally dropped his cylinder head overboard; Gibraltar, the farthest offshore rock the boats fished – so far off and two or three times out of sight of land that an anxious tourist on an early trip was heard to remark, “If we go much further, we’ll come up on Gibraltar.” These places and others like Old Man were where the boats ran to get to the fish. They found their way by intersecting ranges back on the hill.
In commenting on the availability of fish in those early years, Carl said there were all the fish you wanted.
“I don’t know how it was out in the Gulf Stream in those days, because it wasn’t necessary to go that far. There was an abundance of reef fish inshore. In those days we
went out to let a man catch a five or six foot string of fish and be back on the hill in a few hours,” Carl said.
“Back in the days ahead of World War I, we used to catch shad in the Cape Fear River in February and March and pull-haul seines full of popeye mullets in the surf in August and September. We dug big amounts of clams that mostly found their way to the fish houses in Wilmington. In addition to fishing Buzzards Bay below Fort Fisher, we also caught fish at Corncake Inlet and Baldhead Island. We got a lot of speckled trout down there.
“All this area – he was pointing to the Carolina Beach Yacht Basin – was beautiful clear sea water with white sandy bottom that was fed for a time by an inlet located about where the pier stands today on the Northern Extension. The sound was much bigger then. When I was very young, I faintly remember going out that inlet with my brothers when they were going offshore to reef fish with handlines. It later closed up with silt when I was about six years old. The sound then had many fish and oysters before the Waterway was dredged,” Carl said.
Fishing has come a long way since the end of World War I, when Harper McQuillan and the other commercial men got started, and from 1927 when Carl turned it into a business for tourists. Today it’s a matter of electronics that guide boats to the offshore ledges many times out of sight of land, and the old days of finding reefs and rock formations on the sea floor by intersecting ranges on land or using a soap-loaded sounding lead to verify the rocks are gone.
Carl has seen it all happen and has played center stage during most of its growth. You could honestly get away with calling him the “Ancient Mariner” except for the fact that he’s held up under the years pretty well and can still take a load of anglers offshore for a go with the reef fish.
