We Were All Family: David Yates Looks Back on the Menhaden Industry

TALES FROM THE WORKING WATERFRONT: DAVID YATES

by Coastal 55+ Guide

“When he put his feet on the floor, he put his feet in water,” David said.

The house was already flooding.

His father awakened David’s mother, gathered the baby, and began pounding on the doors of nearby company housing, where several other North Carolina fishing families were living.

“Daddy went around beating on doors, waking people up,” David said. “He got Mama and myself in the car, and we started down the road trying to get out.”

They did not get far.

“Right by the fish factory, the road flooded out,” he said. “It got too deep, and he couldn’t go any further.”

The families took shelter inside the fish factory, climbing above the rising water near its large boilers.

“We got up on top of those, and several other families were up there with us,” David said. “That’s where we rode out the storm.”

David is careful to explain that these are memories inherited from his parents.

“I have memories of their stories,” he said. “I really can’t remember the storm.”

What he remembers is wishing he could hear their voices telling it again.

“I wish I had recorded Mama talking about it, and Daddy, and things like that,” he said. “But we didn’t have all this fancy technology stuff.”

After the storm, a boat transported the survivors to a refugee center in Lake Charles. Harvey Smith later sent buses to carry the North Carolina women and children home.

The men stayed behind. They repaired the fish factory and went back to work.

“They went on fishing,” David said. “They had a real good summer.”

It was an early chapter in a life that would continue to revolve around menhaden factories, fishing boats, changing weather, and the people who worked the water.

“I told him, ‘Yeah,’ so I went in the boats that day,” David said.

Nearby, Captain Eugene Hodges had made a large set of fish but did not have enough manpower to raise it. Captain Charlie brought the Lynn Ann crew over to help.

Between the two crews, David remembers roughly 30 men crowding into wooden purse boats. Many were older fishermen who had spent their lives working the local waters.

Menhaden crews used purse seines, large nets that surrounded schools of fish and closed underneath them. Before mechanical equipment took over much of the heavy lifting, raising those nets required tremendous strength and teamwork.

Back then, David said, the Sound crews raised their nets by hand.

“The old men started singing a chantey,” he said.

David weighed only about 145 pounds and was pulling alongside men who understood something he was just beginning to learn. The songs were not simply entertainment. Their rhythm helped the fishermen pull together.

He remembers pulling so hard that he felt as though he might bust the net.

“I’ll never forget those old men singing that chantey.”

Many of those same men later became associated with Beaufort’s menhaden chantey tradition.

“All those men I fished with were the original chantey singers,” David said. “When I got a captain’s job, most of them fished with me.”

The men beside whom he struggled to pull a net as a teenager would someday work aboard boats he captained.

A blow was coming.

That night Captain Charlie sent David aft with instructions to watch the stern and call if it looked as though anything was beginning to break loose.

David and the chief engineer sat there through the night with a small gasoline pump helping keep water out.

“It was a terrible night,” David said.

What he remembers most is the view.

As the Lynn Ann rolled one way, David could see water rising alongside the boat. When she rolled back, he was looking at the stars.

Water. Stars. Water. Stars.

“I was too young and dumb to be scared,” he said.

On the next trip, the generator failed and the boat lost its bilge pumps.

Captain Charlie looked at what had happened and told David that if the same failure had occurred during the storm, they probably would not have survived it.

David still considers that one of the worst nights he experienced on the water.

From the Lynn Ann on, fishing worked its way around almost everything else in his life.

“Every time I got out of school, and sometimes I’d skip school, I would go fishing with him,” David said of Captain Charlie.

Years passed. David earned his captain’s license, although he no longer remembers whether he was 18 or 21 when he received it.

Eventually the Novelty was bought in Fernandina, Florida, and brought to Beaufort. David was asked to fish her.

He did.

Then came another opportunity.

When there were few fish along the beach, David was asked to take the Sea Dog into the Sound. He brought members of his regular outside crew along, including a cook and second engineer.

They went fishing.

They caught the fish.

Then the payroll went in.

Company officials told David they were not going to pay for a cook and second engineer on a Sound boat.

David was not impressed.

The work had already been done and the fish had already been caught.

“I told him to take the whole works and stick it,” David recalled.

Then he did something that became something of a pattern in his life.

He went back to Captain Charlie.

Then word reached him that Captain Charlie was looking for him and would probably call.

David knew exactly what that meant.

That night, before going to bed, he laid his clothes at the foot of the bed, just as he always did when he was going fishing.

His wife noticed.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Nothing,” David told her. “Just putting my clothes out.”

Around 2 o’clock in the morning, the telephone rang.

It was Captain Charlie.

David remembers Charlie telling him he needed him.

“I’ll be there just as quick as I can,” David said.

He got out of bed and started dressing.

His wife warned him that if he went fishing, she might not be there when he came back.

David went anyway.

“You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” he recalled. “I’m going fishing.”

She was still there when he returned.

And David added one more detail to the story.

They caught a load of fish that day.

“That probably helped,” he said.

Captain Charlie remained one of the defining people in David’s career.

By then, the two eventually worked together aboard a vessel with an unusual history. David remembered her as a former military cargo or lighter vessel that had been used to move supplies among Pacific islands where larger ships could not go.

W.H. “Piggy” Potter of Beaufort Fisheries acquired the vessel and had her converted for the menhaden fishery.

Captain Charlie ran her for several years.

David eventually began shooting the net for him.

When Charlie’s health began to fail, he decided it was time to retire. Potter initially planned to put someone else in command.

Charlie objected.

“If you do, you’re going to make a mistake,” David remembered him saying. “You should give her to David Yates.”

Potter trusted Charlie’s judgment.

David got the boat, the same vessel on which he had worked under Captain Charlie, and captained her for three or four seasons.

It was more than another assignment.

Captain Charlie had known David since he was a teenager who would take almost any opportunity to go fishing. He had watched him become a crewman, a net man, and eventually a captain.

When it came time to leave his own boat behind, Charlie put David’s name forward to take his place.

“The Carl Burton was a sweet boat,” David said. “She didn’t have any vibration. She handled good.”

Then the Barataria Bay became available.

The attraction was not necessarily the vessel herself.

It was her purse boats.

They were practically new.

The company offered David the Barataria Bay along with them.

David countered with another idea.

He wanted to keep the Carl Burton and take the newer purse boats.

The company would not split them up.

So David took the Barataria Bay.

On paper, he remembered her as being very similar to the boat he loved.

In practice, she was anything but.

“That was a common boat,” he said. “That thing drove me crazy.”

There were vibrations and strange sounds, including noises from the refrigeration system.

David captained her for four seasons anyway.

That was the nature of the work. A captain did not always get the boat he loved.

The years that followed brought more vessels, more plants, and more moves along the Gulf Coast.

Some were steps up.

Some were not.

One vessel had been converted from an oilfield supply boat, a configuration David did not particularly care for.

Another was the Calcasieu Pass, which he remembers as a comfortable boat that drew more water than was ideal for working out of Abbeville.

Decades later, the old vessel found another purpose. In August 2026, the retired Calcasieu Pass was deliberately sunk off Delaware to become an artificial reef.

Then came one of the longest relationships David had with any vessel.

The Albert J. Bourg.

The company had taken the older boat from what David called “the graveyard,” where retired vessels were kept. Boats that were still worth saving could sometimes be pulled back out and refurbished.

The Albert J. Bourg was one of them.

David got her.

He fished her for 13 seasons.

During one of those early seasons, David took her north to fish in connection with Beaufort Fisheries during the fall, part of an arrangement involving Gulf boats and the Beaufort plant.

Eventually he returned to the Gulf, where he continued fishing for what would become the final stretch of his commercial menhaden career.

Ask David about those years and the boats still come readily to mind.

The Cat Island.

The Lynn Ann.

The Novelty.

The Charlie Pittman.

The Sea Dog.

The Carl Burton.

The Barataria Bay.

The Calcasieu Pass.

The Albert J. Bourg.

There were others, too.

In his fishing room today, David keeps models of vessels that figured in his life. During our conversation he moved among them, pointing out boats one by one as though introducing old acquaintances.

For someone whose working life was measured in fishing seasons, the boats became more than equipment.

Some were sweet boats.

Some drove him crazy.

Some lasted only a few seasons.

Others carried him for more than a decade.

And every one of them carried people he still remembers.

“Let’s go up here and talk to Levi.”

They walked into the net house.

Captain Charlie got directly to the point.

“Levi, this boy needs a job.”

Levi asked David whether he knew how to mend nets.

“No, sir,” David answered.

Levi had an answer for that.

“Well, you’re about to learn.”

David went to work.

At first, his job was washing the huge nets. They would be wound onto reels and he would get in with a large water hose and clean them.

After the nets had been washed and put away, the men brought him inside.

“Come on in here,” he remembers being told. “We’re gonna teach you how to mend.”

“They taught me how to mend,” David said. “I already knew how to splice and stuff like that.”

The technical skills mattered.

Keeping the nets maintained mattered.

“Nobody ever lost a net because we kept them up good,” David said.

But when David talks about the net house, the conversation quickly moves away from the work.

It becomes about people.

“Back then everybody was friends and neighbors,” he said. “It was just good people.”

People from town would stop in.

Beaufort was still, as David describes it, a “little old tiny fishing town.”

Men would sit around and tell stories, joke, tease one another, and pass the time.

David did not have to be working to want to be there.

“I’ve always told everybody I’d rather be at Beaufort Fisheries net house than be home, and I did,” he said. “I’d get up mornings when I wasn’t working, and I’d go to the net house and just hang around all day, shooting the bull with everybody.”

“The Beaufort Fisheries net house, it was amazing,” David said. “I’ve had the best life. I’ve been blessed.”

Again, he comes back to the same regret he expressed when talking about his parents’ Hurricane Audrey stories.

He wishes he had their voices.

“If I just had recordings of it,” he said.

His nephew, also a captain, had gone to work for Broussard Brothers, a Louisiana marine company, running small, fast crew boats used to transport workers, parts, and supplies.

He told his uncle he ought to try it.

David resisted.

He did not want another career.

He did not particularly want another job.

His nephew assured him this one was different.

“This is an easy job,” he told him.

David finally agreed to talk with the company, but on his own terms.

Would they hire him part time and simply call when they needed him?

They would.

He worked that way for roughly a year and a half and found that he liked it.

Then Broussard Brothers landed a larger job that took David to the Orange, Texas, area.

The company apparently assumed he would not want to remain there.

David surprised them.

“Whoa, wait a minute,” he remembered telling them. “I want to do this.”

The schedule became 14 days on and seven days off.

After decades of commercial fishing, David discovered something almost foreign to him.

“Stress,” he said when asked what he liked about the job. “There was no stress at all.”

He would pick up workers in the morning and take them to a job site.

Sometimes he made runs back to the dock for parts or supplies.

Other days he dropped off the crew and waited until late afternoon to bring them back.

The boats themselves suited him.

Powered by three 250-horsepower outboards, they could run around 40 miles per hour.

David had spent much of his life operating boats through marshes and coastal waters.

Now he could still do it without carrying the responsibility of finding fish, producing a catch, and running a commercial menhaden vessel.

“It was just a perfect job for a retired person,” he said.

David finally retired from the crew boats in March.

Even now, there is one exception to his insistence that he is finished.

If his nephew were ever in a bind and truly needed a pilot, David admits he might still answer the call.

Otherwise?

“I’m done with it.”

Captain Charlie telling Piggy Potter that David was the man who should get his boat.

The Carl Burton, the sweet one.

The Barataria Bay, the one that drove him crazy.

Thirteen seasons aboard the Albert J. Bourg.

Levi looking at a young father who needed winter work and telling him, “You’re about to learn.”

Days at the Beaufort Fisheries net house when people came by for no reason more complicated than wanting to sit together and talk.

And now, a four-year-old named Tater, keeping him from rusting.

A working life can be measured in years.

David Yates’s can be measured in boats, captains, crews, and stories.

But when he looks back, it is the people who mattered most.

After reading about the effort to preserve his memories, David expressed his appreciation, but his thoughts quickly turned to others.

“There are so many people who influenced me,” he said. “I wish I could honor them.”

Perhaps, in telling his own story, he is doing just that.

Every captain who gave him a chance, every fisherman who taught him something, every friend who stood beside him, and every old-timer whose voice he wishes he could hear again is part of the life he remembers so fondly.

“I’ve had the best life,” David said. “I’ve been blessed.”

And even now, after finally deciding he is finished with fishing, part of him remains with the people and boats that filled those years.

“I love my fishing,” David said. “I miss the fishing and the people.”