One More Good Adventure

Invasive, non-indigenous flora and fauna have been a problem in Florida since the white man first landed on its shores.

Melaleuca trees

were introduced in the 30s to help dry out the Everglades for the development of housing tracts. The tree invades a variety of wetland habitats including sawgrass marshes, wet prairies, and aquatic sloughs. It often forms impenetrable thickets, reduces biodiversity, displaces native vegetation and reduces the value of these habitats for wildlife. It also accelerates the loss of groundwater due to increased evapotranspiration. Melaleuca is native to Australia, New Guinea, and New Caledonia.

Brazilian peppertree, originally introduced in the 1840s as an ornamental invades a variety of habitats including old fields, forests, hammocks, ditches, and wetlands. It forms dense thickets that displace native vegetation.

The Florida Invasive Species Partnership also counts an additional 138 plant species as a problem such as kudzu, alligator weed, camphortree, and waterhyacinth.

There are 62 species of fish listed by the partnership and stories of the Walking Catfish were quite common several years ago. When their habitat dries out they have the ability to “walk” a limited distance using their front fins as legs.

Eighty five species of birds are on the list. It’s not uncommon here in southeast Florida to see flights of parakeets and macaws that are descendents of pets that either escaped or were released by people who grew tired of them. Parrots build huge nests in telephone poles and it’s not uncommon to have them blow out transformers in the process.

Fire ants and Africanized honey bees are only two of the more than 27 non-native insect pests on the list.

Zebra mussels are among the 25 molluscs identified by the Partnership.

There are 14 different ticks along with the sea squirt in the arachnid division.

Only six crustaceans, including the mangrove boring isopod and the Indo Pacific swimming crab, are to be found.

Nutria, commonly referred to as “rats” in Cajun country, the Indian Mongoose and the rhesus monkey made it into the mammal section. Most of the rhesus monkeys were formerly research subjects that escaped when hurricanes destroyed the facilities where they were kept.

The cane toad, Bufo marinus, famous for their toxic secretions which are supposed to have hallucinogenic properties and are notorious for killing pet dogs that bite them are half of the amphibion pests.

There are 67 reptiles on the list. The one getting the most press these days are the Burmese pythons that are being found in the Everglades.

Undoubtedly released into the wild by disillusioned pet owners it is believed there is now a breeding population in the Glades.

But the most visible reptilian pest, aside from the ubiquitous anole lizards

are iguanas.

They’re everywhere. They’re pests that devour flowers and gardens with impunity.

In certain parts of Central and South America, they are regarded as FOOD and often are referred to as “Tree Chickens.”

Thursday evening my roommate, Kevin, returned from a friend’s house that is located in the Las Olas Isles section of Fort Lauderdale with the announcement that he’d brought home “dinner for tomorrow” and proceeded to take a three and a half foot-long iguana from the plastic bag he was carrying. He had talked a long time about how he wanted to try iguana and Thursday he had been able to shoot this one on our friend’s dock.

While Kevin was butchering the beast I went on line scouring the internet for an appropriate recipe. The lizard dressed out with about two pounds of meat and Kevin proceeded to cook the following Iguana Stew.

3 to 4 pounds of iguana

1 teaspoon salt

3 peeled and sliced potatoes

1 large sliced onion

1 cup lima beans

1 cup canned tomatoes

1 tablespoon sugar

1 cup frozen corn

Salt and pepper to taste

1 tablespoon ketchup or Worcestershire sauce

1/4 cup of butter

Place iguana in Dutch oven with enough boiling water to cover. Add salt and simmer for 45 minutes.

Add potatoes, onion, lima beans, tomatoes and sugar. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes or until beans and potatoes are tender.

Add corn, cover and simmer for 10 minutes.

Season with salt and pepper and add ketchup or Worcestershire sauce if desired.

Add butter and stir well.

I’m not squeamish about the foods I ingest. I LOVE escargot, have chowed down on Bambi’s mom, the Easter Bunny, goat, kangaroo tail and, in France, horse (the meat you can bet on). If I was visiting a country, like Korea, where dog is often on the menu I’d give that a shot but I wouldn’t kill Penny to try it. So I didn’t have a problem with trying iguana. After all, they aren’t carrion feeders like lobsters, crabs and shrimp. Iguanas are strict fruit, flower and veggie eaters.

Actually the stew was quite tasty, and yes, while most uncommon delicacies are said to taste “like chicken” that’s exactly what iguana tastes like. If you were blindfolded and weren’t told what you were eating you’d swear it was chicken. For the most part people’s aversion to eating certain foods, octopus, calamari and conch, come to mind, isn’t the food itself but the thought of the food about to be consumed that upsets people.

Kevin will probably be cooking Tree Chicken Stew again. He says it would be best to have two iguanas so he would have eight legs and two tails, the only meaty portions of the beast, to work with.

I’ve had a lot of different jobs in my lifetime. Some were pretty good: newspaper reporter, magazine editor, hospital public relations director. Some were okay: Limo driver, boat rigger, bar tender, pizza delivery driver. Some were great: captain of an 85′ sailboat on the French Riviera, captain of several yachts and captain of crewboats in the Louisiana oil patch. And some jobs really sucked: captain of a 300-passenger tour boat in Chicago that was so boring I put the entire lecture on tape so I wouldn’t have to say the same boring lecture 12 times a day, six days a week, customer service representative, night manager or a fish and chips restaurant that paid $5 an hour and all the steaks and lobster tails I could carry out of the joint, and teaching a course in Nautical Science at West Jefferson High School in Louisiana.

But absolutely the worst job I ever had was the second job in my maritime career. When I got divorced I decided to pursue my dream of working on boats and got a job as deckhand on a dinner-cruise boat in Fort Lauderdale. It was a pretty good job despite the fact that it paid practically nothing. In fact, more than 30 years after I got that job, I’m still in regular contact with the captain of that boat.

When the boat voted to have union representation I was made shop steward in a rigged election (hey it’s good union tradition). Towards the end of the first year of operation the company was mired in deep financial problems and the workers (boat crew, wait staff and galley slaves) weren’t getting their pay checks. As shop steward I figured it was my duty to rattle the cages of the union officials to whom we were paying dues. I made regular appearances at the union hall and lots of phone calls, none of which helped our situation.

Late one night, just as I was getting ready to go to bed, there was a knock on my front door. I opened it to find a pair of  beefy, no neck union thugs. “We’ve got a job for you on a ship in Detroit. Be there in a week,” they said. I packed things up,put some stuff in storage and either threw or gave away everything else and six days later I stood outside the Detroit Greyhound station on a cold March day watching the falling snow turn brown before it hit the ground.

The Union Hall was as grungy and depressing as you would expect it to be but they fixed me up with papers to take to the Coast Guard offices so I could be issued a “Z card” which would allow me to work as an Ordinary Seaman on large ships. Back at the Union Hall they gave me some other papers and I was given directions on how to find the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant where I was to report on the SS Consumers Power, a self-unloading bulk carrier.

The ship was built in 1927 as a Straight Deck Lake Bulk Freighter by the American Ship Building Co., Lorain, OH as Hull #796. Launched December 30, 1926 as a) GEORGE M. HUMPHREY (1) for the Kinsman Transit Co., Cleveland, OH. and was 605′ loa.

The GEORGE M. HUMPHREY sunk in 80 feet of water after a collision with the steamer D.M. CLEMSON  off Old Point Light, at 2:50 a.m. on June 15, 1943. The HUMPHREY was downbound in the fog shrouded Straits of Mackinac with 13,992 tons of ore for South Chicago, IL. Thirty-one of the crew were rescued by the steamer LAGONDA, the remaining eight by the CLEMSON. Kinsman abandoned the HUMPHREY to the underwriters as a total loss for $860,000. The ship was raised, towed to The GEORGE M. HUMPHREY (1) sunk in 80 feet of water after a collision with the steamer D.M. CLEMSON (2) , 1 7/8 miles, 79 degrees off Old Point Light, at 2:50 a.m. on June 15, 1943.

The ship was towed to Manitowoc Ship Building Co., Manitowoc, WI, first for an estimate of repairs which totaled $469,400, and then was towed to Sturgeon Bay by the tug JOHN ROEN III arriving there on September 9th for reconditioning which was completed at a reported cost of $437,000. The ship re-entered service on May 1, 1945. She was renamed CONSUMERS POWER in 1958.

Self- unloaders are called that because that’s exactly how they discharge their cargo. You can see in the photo above the big boom that swings out from the ship. Two conveyor belts are located alongside the keel and these transport the cargo, in our case coal and rock salt, up to the boom and over the side like this:

As a result these ships are never in port very long as you can see by looking at the arrival and departure times of a few of these entries in the Shipping Log of the Muskegon News:

Vessel: Samuel de Champlain (tug)/Innovation (barge).

Length: 544 feet.

Destination: LaFarge slip, next to Heritage Landing.

Cargo: Cement.

Scheduled arrival: 11 p.m. Saturday.

Scheduled departure: 10 a.m. Sunday.

Vessel: H. Lee White

Length: 704 feet

Destination: Consumers Energy, B.C. Cobb slip

Cargo: Coal

Scheduled arrival: 11 a.m. Thursday

Scheduled departure: 6 p.m. Thursday

Vessel: American Century.

Length: 1,000 feet.

Destination: Consumers Energy Cobb slip.

Cargo: Coal.

Scheduled arrival: 2:30 a.m. Saturday.

Scheduled departure: 10:30 a.m. Saturday.

With the ships only staying at a dock for half a day or less this certainly wasn’t going to be a leisurely summer visiting ports on the Great Lakes. Unlike the work schedules I would encounter in the offshore oil industry a few years later where you generally worked a 14 days on followed by 14 days off or 7 on and 7 off on these ships you went aboard and worked pretty much until you got fed up and left or until the lake ports froze over.

Essentially what my job consisted of was to descend into the hold as the cargo was being discharged and knock down errant piles of coal and rock salt onto the conveyors and then washing the holds out with high-pressure hoses if the next cargo was going to be different than the one just dumped on shore. The only cool part of the job was docking. If you look at the photo you’ll see, just aft of the forward structure, a thin boom and a “T” shape dangling from it. When coming into a dock either myself or another OS would stand on the gunwale, slip the upside down piece of the tee between your legs and jump off the ship to be lowered to the dock where you’d put the steel lines to the bollards to tie the ship up for its short stay.

The worst part of the job, however, was shoveling coal or rock salt for 12 hours a day and having to share a tiny, overheated cabin with Abdul from Yemen. I lasted on the job for 10 days before I jumped ship back in Detroit.

Upon leaving the ship I headed to Chicago where I started a three-year long affair with a girl I’d worked with when I was an editor and I got my first skipper’s gig running a 42′ Hatteras Tri-cabin which I delivered to Fort Lauderdale in the Fall. On that trip out through the lengths of Lakes Michigan, Huron and Erie, I ran across the Consumers Power taking on a load of coal in Toledo, Ohio.

The Consumers Power was laid up for the last time at Erie, PA on December 6, 1985. She was sold for scrap in March of 1988 and was towed out of Erie on May 2, 1988 by the tug W.N. TWOLAN, later joined by the tug GLENSIDE, and arrived at Lauzon, Que. on May 9th. On June 14th she cleared Lauzon in tandem tow with her former fleetmate, the steamer JOHN T. HUTCHINSON behind the Panamanian tug OMEGA 809.. The CONSUMERS POWER passed through the Panama Canal July 12th as a single tow followed by the HUTCHINSON’s tow two days later. The tandem tow arrived at Kaohsiung, Taiwan October 2, 1988 where dismantling began on October 14th by Li Chong Steel & Iron Works Co. Ltd.