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Robert Hudgins, pictured in his garage-museum, says, “I was born a fisherman and I was proud to be one…. My daughter says, ‘When you smell like fish it means money’.”
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Hudgins’ garage-museum holds many treasures including this fishing pier diorama with boats and a bucket and crane to lift the catch from boat to dish house.
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Mathews waterman Robert Hudgins displays his extensive collection of fishing, oystering, and other water focused memorabilia in his garage-museum.
If you can see the Eastern Shore from Mathews County, you’d better get ready for some wind.
The sign in the front yard of his house says it all: An old fisherman lives here. Captain Robert Hudgins will tell you he began fishing somewhere around 10 or 11 years old and, unlike his brothers, he liked it from the beginning.
“Back then, I went to Winter Harbor School. It was three rooms and seven grades,” he says from his garage in Mathews, essentially a watermen’s museum chock full of photographs and fishing mementoes. “The bigger boys had to cut wood and make a fire for the schoolhouse every morning. That was me.”
He went as far as 10th grade before leaving academics behind for the lure of the bay and a paycheck. “The only ‘A’ I ever got in school was on pound nets,” he says with a laugh. Years later after Coast Guard service, he was awarded an honorary diploma.
Pound nets were Hudgins’ specialty for his 62-year fishing career. Considered the oldest kind of net used by Chesapeake Bay watermen, the nets will trap anything that moves through them. The process begins with stakes. “Pound stakes are nothing but a tree you cut down with an ax,” Hudgins says. “You cut the branches off, skin most of the bark off, leaving some for the worms to eat and you paint it.”
That much done, the stakes are pushed into the bottom of the bay spaced apart in a line that runs across the tide. Then nets are strung between the stakes and along the bottom of the bay to create the trap. Nets are set out by the middle of March with the fishermen going out each day to scoop out fish with hand nets. Except for repairs, pound nets stayed in place generally until November.
“There’s very few pound nets left in Virginia,” he says with a trace of regret pointing to a photo of himself and his friend Larry Tobin pound fishing. “Hardly any. But that was the way of living in Mathews: pound nets and crab pots.”
When he began fishing part-time as a kid with E. Armistead and Sons, with his uncles, known as Captain Gene’s boys, he made $7 for every week of fishing work and learned much.
At 16, he got his first full-time job as a deckhand on the William Somers, an oyster dredge boat. He lived on the boat during the week, went home on weekends, and worked it for four winters.
“I made $35 a week plus food and foul weather gear. But it was so cold sleeping on the boat that first season. We had four men and five bunks and when we ran out of firewood, we tore up that extra bunk and burned it for heat.”
His memories of the food served on the oyster boats stayed with him. “The boat company furnished a cook and we had fish, flour bread, molasses with corn bread. It was good eating.
The cook used to set pies in the window to cool and every time we walked by, we’d take a pie. After a while, he told the captain he better get himself another crew because ‘this one eats too much.’”
After some years, he started fishing menhaden in New Jersey under a prominent old menhaden captain, eventually working his way up to captain himself. The fish were small but plentiful and their fish oil is prized for use in everything from cat food to cosmetics and paint.
“Fishing was harder back then because it was all man-powered,” he recalls. “There was no machinery to hoist nets. It took a 22-man crew to pull nets in by hand. Now they only need 14. It was no easy life but it was a good life.”
Warm weather found him in Louisiana for 30 seasons from April to October, where boat crews competed against each other for who brought in the most fish. One net can hold thousands of menhaden and bonuses were paid following large catches.
“You have to have a good crew if you want to come out good. They give you the boat, but you have to put together a good crew. I knew that but I didn’t practice it until later when I was older and had some wisdom. A reliable crew makes it more pleasurable.”
It was challenging being away from his family six months of the year—he learned he was a first-time grandfather as he was coming up the channel to the factory in Louisiana with a boat load of fish—but he acknowledges missing that life. “Sometimes I wish I was there now.”
Fishing can be year-round work, often six days a week. But his Mathews family understood the way of the watermen. “When you smell like fish, it means money,” daughter Nancy Rowe says with a smile, recalling her childhood.
“I paid taxes to five states one year: New Jersey, Delaware, Louisiana, Virginia, and North Carolina ‘cause I’d worked seasonally in them all.
I lived two very different experiences with my life in Mathews and my life in Louisiana. And I had seven summers in Atlantic City fishing.”
In 1992, he retired at age 63. “I didn’t want to retire, but I had macular degeneration and you have to have good vision to fish menhaden. I miss everything about being on the Gulf of Mexico, being able to see it, being able to balance on a boat. I don’t want to go on a boat now because with the macular degeneration, I can’t balance myself.”
Far from idle in the interim, Captain Hudgins has turned his finished garage into a watermen’s museum of sorts, a testament to Mathews County’s debt to the bounty of the bay. Colorful photographs from the ‘50s to the present document a history first of wooden fishing boats and then the steel varieties that replaced them.
Since retirement, he’s done some pound fishing, dredged crabs and as he says, “anything to keep busy.” He’s always loved painting and his colorful marine scenes add to the feel of a museum he likes to call “his collection of memories.”
As a way to stay connected to the watermen’s life, his current pastime is hand-crafting crab and oyster dredges, mainly for watermen in Delaware since they’re now illegal in Virginia. The work provides income and satisfaction.
A dredge consists of a heavy steel frame with a net and chain bag combined. The frame is fashioned from large S-hooks and 2-inch rings Local machine shops make the dredge frame along with “patches,” smaller sections of the metal frames, for watermen to use on damaged sections.
Dredge-making is considered a lost art and while he insists plenty of people could do it, he also allows that few do. Crab dredges vary from 5 to 8 feet, and he creates different sized nets for different sized fish.
“Let me make you a mesh net,” he offers, making his way toward a ladder nailed to the wall to work from. Anchoring rope to the ladder, he uses a large needle to fashion a net.
“I used to do this so fast, you couldn’t hardly see my hands moving,” he says as his hands fly over the rope anchored to the ladder and a net takes shape in front a visitor’s startled eyes. He explains that learning the skill was a by-product of the fishing life because of the need to mend nets every season.
Most mornings he can be found at M & M Building Supply, “talking to people about old times, seeing how far back they can go, what their grandparents used to say, foolish stuff.” One of the pictures on the wall shows the group of regulars looking relaxed and convivial.
Like Hudgins, it’s a group who know all the old axioms of life on the water. Red sky in morning, sailor take warning. If sea gulls are inland, look out for bad weather. Seeing a yellow butterfly means a nor’easter is brewing.
In his estimation, fishing doesn’t offer the same opportunities to today’s young people that it did for him. “Young people today have education and knowledge, computers to make a living. It’s a different ballgame than when we started. Back then, you worked hard for what you got. If you tell a young man to go fish for a living today, he’s taking a gamble. Now you’ve got to have a license and insurance. If he has the best equipment, works hard and is honest, he can still make a living, but it’s a gamble. That’s what I told my boy.”
“It’s not like it was in the old days. Nature controls fishing, crabbing and oystering. It’s a cycle,” he says, standing in front of pictures of himself. When asked which man in the photographs is him, he says with absolute confidence that he’s the handsome one. It’s immediately apparent which man is Robert Hudgins, regardless of which decade the photo was taken.
“Used to be if you caught so many fish, you got a bonus and you made more money on your next catch. We were paid by the thousand caught. It just didn’t come easy. But I was born a fisherman and I was proud to be one.”
