Beneath the photo were announcements for the time and place of the wake, the church service and the burial. Someone I had not seen in person or spoken to in more than a decade—but who figured prominently in my memory of what the Bay Islands were—was gone. In the following days, memories of the era when he and I moved in shrimping industry circles came to mind organically.

I returned from the United States to Roatan in the mid-1990s with my girlfriend, intending to live on the island for at least one year.
Within a week or two of arriving, we were able to rent a home on the eastern tip of a cay along Roatan’s south shore. On the day we moved in—having few belongings made this quick—we sat on the porch swing, feeling like we were finally settled into the house.

The first thing that enveloped us was a steady breeze coming off the grass bar. A sense of familiarity came over me—I was home. She sensed this satisfaction in me, and it pleased her. Before long, we saw a school of sprats, a gray mass against a large white area on the grass bar. The mass was eluding a barracuda that was on the hunt. The school of sprats seemed to feint the barracuda’s strikes as if it were a single being. After a time, the gray mass reached the channel and disappeared from our view.

Son sat on a wooden chair next to the open grave.

Yellow and red hibiscus flowers had opened along the narrow dirt paths of the cemetery grounds, with the leaves of the hibiscus plants still damp from overnight squalls. Gravestones—more recent ones fashioned by a stone worker from up The Point—stand sacred to the memory of islanders who passed long ago and more recently. A group of Black men, women and children from off The Hill had gathered for the funeral. Mr. Leonard stood tall among them—an uncommon sight, as he was without his wide-brimmed hat, left at home out of respect. While making their way along the paths to the freshly dug grave, the adults brushed the hibiscus leaves at their hips and thighs, the children at their shoulders and torsos. Their clothing was damp in those areas.

The deceased’s adult son sat on a wooden chair next to the open grave, with two lengths of strong rope with frayed ends curled at his feet. He was silent, his face streaked with tears as he watched his mother’s simple, unpainted pine casket. It was placed on top of a varnished mahogany table. Standing near the trunk of the trumpet tree, under whose branches the woman would be laid to rest, a local pastor delivered the sermon.

“Friends, we must tend to our many-colored garden in our dedication to our Christian will and our belief in God Almighty,” he began.

The shrimping season [La temporada] typically opened on the first day of July. Though some departed at dawn, other shrimp boats began leaving at midnight, one after the other. Their hulls were painted in patterns unique to the owners, colors not easily discernible in the night, But their back decks, all painted white, were ablaze in light with their outriggers spread wide.

Once passing the reef breakers to the port and starboard and with a course set at 110 to 115 degrees, the captains opened up the shrimpers’ throttles and the Cummins and Caterpillar engines roared. There was the Gulf Wave, Silver Seas, Captain Dale-O, Active, Thunderbird, Lady Val, and Lady Barbara, the last two being wood hulls. There was the Captain Carl, Three Brothers, Miss Verna, Sheena Mc and Geechee Boy, the last being a fiberglass hull. And there were so many others, with each becoming a world on to its own for the next three months, the standard length of the first trip of a shrimping season.

In the 1980s, there were some 75 to 80 shrimpers.

On board a shrimper, in addition to the captain, there are the winchman, the cook, and the regular crew. Given the large hauls of shrimp at the start of the season, the regular crew can comprise eight to ten men. At the start of the season, many boats work around the clock, fishing offshore at night and along the beaches during daytime, with the captain holding the 6 a.m. to noon and 6 p.m. to midnight watches, while the winchman holds the other two. The winchman is responsible for the maintenance of the nets and a myriad of other duties. The cook is paramount, preparing two meals per day.

The shrimping grounds are vast and are nowhere near the Bay Islands. Depending on where a captain wishes to spend his first night shrimping, his boat could be running continuously for twelve hours or more before the nets are put down for the first time. On a given night, well into a season, some shrimpers can be dragging the grounds off of Punta Castilla, while others are off of Punta Patuca or Caratasca. Still others are at the same time working up near Cabo Gracias a Dios, or the big open grounds west of Bogus Keys (Cayos Vivorillos) or in the vicinity of The Hobbies (Cayos Cojones).