1.  Two short stories by Larry (2008) -- Wye Goodie and Stalking Panther -- about his early years in Pass-a-Grille, Florida.

2. A layman's obituary of L R  Pomeroy

3. Larry's  manuscript "Science Comes to Sapelo: The Founding and Early Years of the UGA Marine Institute, 1954-60."

4. "Science at Sea" stories by Larry -  research cruises and expeditions, 1960 to 1993.

                               --Do not use or reproduce without permission--

            After about two hours on course, Danny Martin, the owner, pulls back the throttle. Now we have to find the grouper. They are, of course, a bottom fish that usually stays near coral or other reefs. The reefs are twenty-five fathoms below the boat, but there is a way to find reefs and grouper. Danny hands me an armed lead line. The armament is Fels naptha soap. A cavity in the bottom of the sounding lead has been pressed full of the soft soap and the surface of the soap smoothed. Standing near the bow of the boat, I throw the lead as far forward as possible and the boat overrides it as it falls. I bounce the lead on bottom when it is directly beneath me and then retrieve it to examine the surface of the soap. Stuck to it are grains of black and white sand. I call out, “salt and pepper,” scrape the soap clean with my knife, and do another cast of the lead. Again it is salt and pepper. Another cast, and this time there is no sand but the smooth surface of the soap is dimpled from contact with coral or limestone. I call out, “Rock.” Danny, who is at the wheel, immediately tosses a piece of crumpled paper over the side. He brings the boat around and we drop the anchor a bit upwind of the floating paper. We are now anchored over hard, rocky bottom or live coral.

          To lure the fish, Danny produces a brown paper bag and a handful of sardines he had caught previously and stored on ice. Into the bag go the sardines and also the sounding lead. The bag is now tied shut above the lead. He lets the bag with lead and fish fall to bottom and bounces it up and down long enough for the bag to disintegrate and release the sardines. This process is called chumming, which draws in the grouper with some tasty food. We then put sturdy hand-fishing lines over both sides of the boat. At the end of each line is a five-pound sinker into which have been cast steel eyes to which two swivels, steel leaders, and large hooks are attached. Each hook is baited with a chunk of fish. As our sinkers hit bottom, we know at once we have a catch. With two large groupers on the line, it is not a simple matter to pull them in. When both fish decide to swim downward, the only recourse is to bend the line over the gunwale and hold on until they change their minds. When the groupers finally have been hauled up twenty-five fathoms, their eyes are popping from the sockets and their bodies are distended by the rapid decompression from five-times the sea-surface atmospheric pressure at the sea bottom.

           Grasping them by the open jaw, I haul each grouper over the gunwale and, continuing to hold the jaw, remove the hook. The fish are tossed into a barrel, the hooks re-baited and dropped to bottom. Immediately the process begins again. Two more groupers are fighting against the line and are brought to the surface as rapidly as possible. Most of them are so large their tails are slapping the deck as I hold them waist-high to unhook them. The smallest, that Danny derisively calls piss-cutters, are about eighteen inches long. After half an hour, we have a barrel full of groupers and no more are biting. We have removed all groupers from that particular bit of sea floor. It is then time to pull up anchor, motor a short distance, and start sounding again: Salt-and-pepper, salt-and-pepper, salt-and pepper, salt-and pepper, rock. Toss the crumpled paper, come about upwind, anchor, chum with sardines, and start pulling in groupers again. Except for a short lunch break, this goes on for about eight hours and it is then time to start back. We have to be back, and be checked off by the Coast Guard, before dark. Back in Boca Ciega Bay, we dock at the fish house and unload the fish one at a time with a big hook. They are bought for eight cents per pound, live weight. At the time, for a kid out of high school, my share of this is a very good wage.

At the dock, we are met by two women who ask us, “Did you see our men out there?” These are wives of men on a grouper boat that did not return the day before and now is not likely to return. Indeed, we saw nothing but waterspouts, not another boat of any kind or any debris of a boat that might have had too close an encounter with a waterspout. The women continue to appear each afternoon for several days. Finally, they accept reality. Encounters with newly widowed women bring home the fact that this is a hazardous occupation, perhaps especially so on the Wye Goodie. Although a little eccentrically shaped, she is a typical Florida fishing boat about forty feet long with a combination cabin-engine-room forward and an open after deck. The Goodie was built by a man of that name, Goodie, who is now too old to fish. One might say that is also true of the boat, but it is a boat Danny could afford to purchase. Each time we start the engine at sea, which is every time we move to a new fishing spot, we all don life jackets. The hope is, apparently, that in the event of an explosion of the gasoline-powered engine, some loose scraps of wood, plus the life jackets, may keep us afloat. But the chance of being found is nil. We learned that from the two women. A person floating at sea in a life jacket is all but invisible, a head bobbing up and down between waves.The grouper banks are far offshore and vast. In wartime, perhaps half a dozen boats are working out there and we never see other fishing boats. The sharks will bring our discomfort to a quicker end than just floating forever in the life jacket. Of course, at seventeen I have not yet had any close encounters with death and think I am immortal. I am enjoying the work and after the first day never that summer am I seasick.



Danny Martin is not the typical fisherman. Only two or three years older than I, he had been a whiz in high school and the local junior college. His father is an attorney in St. Petersburg and commutes to his office every day on the bus from Pass-a-Grille, where he and his two children live (with no wife-mother) in a bay-front home. Danny is interested in science and understands that I am too. We both are observant at sea and notice things a fisherman might not think interesting. Like many very bright people, he has his eccentricities. I once heard him say that he had no intention of marrying any woman who would consider him marriage material. He has grown up without a mother and with a father who, like Danny, is quiet, taciturn, and opinionated. Fishing has become Danny’s life. In spite of being smart and well-read, he seemingly has no motivation for higher education. He has embraced the simple, almost monastic life of a fisherman.

We are a cheerful little group, usually three of us, putting in our long day of fishing. I arrive at the fish house by bicycle in the dark. We pull blocks of ice down to the boat. In the early morning light we motor down to the Coast Guard boat near the inlet and there we stay until the Coast Guard person on duty can actually see the sun. Only then are we allowed to begin our two-hour run out to the grouper reefs. After that first stormy day, the weather has settled into the Florida summer routine. In the morning we motor into a light sea breeze from the west. Out over the continental shelf the days are normally very calm and clear. At the time we are returning, thunderstorms are building to our east and we return through rain-squalls to unload our catch. By essentially randomly steering out to a very large area of outer continental shelf reefs, and being almost the only fishing boat out there, we waste little time chumming up grouper and catching every one on a reef.

It never occurs to us, or to any other fisherman, that every time we do that we eliminate groupers from that part of the sea floor. It didn’t matter then, because there were so few fishermen and so wide a continental shelf. Now, of course, fishermen have outnumbered the groupers and just about caught them all. A thirty-pound grouper, that we would have considered the usual, and caught them two at a time as quickly as we could pull them out of the water, is now a rarity.

Although I enjoyed the fishing life, it did not last long. I was young, had a girl friend, and wanted to take days off. Danny needed someone every day, so he fired me as soon as he found someone who would agree to go to sea every weekday, every week. That brief introduction to the sea did serve to make me ready to embrace oceanography. When I began to go to sea on larger and mostly steel-hulled ships, it all seemed so safe and easy compared to those trips on the Goodie. Danny continued to be a fisherman all of his rather short life. Some old hand from Pass-a-Grille sent me a newspaper clipping stating that Danny had died at age 49 after falling from his boat during stormy weather in the Cayman Islands. The old Wye Goodie, that we thought might blow up or disintegrate any day, outlived Danny. In the 1990s, I was working with a research group using a boat from Skidaway Island on which we travelled up and down the intracoastal waterway in Georgia. As we were passing St. Catherines Island one day, I noticed a familiar, oddly shaped little boat at a dock. With binoculars I was able to read the name on the transom: Wye Goodie.

                               --Do not use or reproduce without permission--

High school began as a lonely experience. I was one of a small group of perhaps 20 kids who were taken 10 miles in a small city bus from Pass-a-Grille to St. Petersburg High School where we were lost in a sea of strangers. Fortunately, one of my first courses was biology, my favorite subject, and I discovered that the high school had a Biology Club. Anyone could join, of course, but the logistics were difficult. Meetings were at night, someplace in St. Petersburg. I was not yet a licensed driver, and this was the middle of World War II with strict gas rationing and a total blackout on the beach islands—no automobile headlights. My parents were sympathetic to a fault. My father had a job in a war plant which made him eligible to buy a bit more gasoline than he needed to get to and from work, so he would drive me to the meetings and he and my mother would somehow kill a couple of hours and then take me back home, driving the last five miles along the blacked-out beaches without headlights or streetlights.

The best part of the Biology Club was the field trips. How the gasoline was finagled, I don’t know, but about once a month we managed to have an all-day trip on a Sunday, usually beginning very early in the morning and returning after dark. Sometimes, several automobiles were used, driven by older students or parents; sometimes someone would arrange for a truck, and we would all ride in the bed of the truck. Much of Florida was still wild. We discovered Weekiwachee Spring, which was then just a big spring out in the woods where the locals went swimming. We located caves in central Florida, around the Brooksville area, and explored them with gasoline lanterns and flashlights. Our favorite, called Gumtree Cave, was not very large, but it had a small stream at the bottom and the stream contained blind crayfish (Cambarus acherontis).

The Biology Club led to my first conflict with religion. Although I was not attending a church or Sunday school, others in the club must have been, and when they went on Sunday field trips they were missed. The ministers’ association in St. Petersburg, asked the Principle of the High School to forbid meetings of school activities on Sundays, and he did issue such an edict. As the club’s response, notices placed on school bulletin boards thereafter stated that the Biology Club would not have a field trip beginning at 6 AM the next Sunday and not meet in front of the school.

Through the Biology Club, I met people who became best friends and with whom I hung out thereafter. One of the first was Betty Pierce, who became my girlfriend. Another was H. Robin Mills. His interest in ornithology was a family affair. His father, Herbert R(aphael) Mills, was a pathologist whose avocation was birds. Indeed, Dr. Mills owned a private bird sanctuary, Whiskey Stump, a mangrove island on the east side of Tampa Bay. Craig Phillips was the one person in the club I already knew. He had gone to the same fifth and sixth grades, coming to Pass-a-Grille from St. Petersburg by bus. Craig’s interest was fish and snakes and, for a kid, he knew a great deal. He was also an accomplished cartoonist. A younger friend, who joined our group a year or so later, was H. Morgan Smith. Morgan’s older brother was a botany graduate student at Harvard, going on expeditions to South America. Morgan also had an interest in botany and was a natural woodsman, someone who seemed never to get lost and was at ease with the natural world.

Within the club, a small group of us became close friends who did a lot of exploring of Florida on our own. The core group consisted of Morgan, Helen Harris (Morgan’s girlfriend), Betty, Robin, and a series of his girlfriends. Robin seemed at first not quite ready for a girlfriend. He dropped the first one when she proposed some rather innocent physical intimacy. Both Robin and Morgan had motorcycles—light, quiet European ones. I couldn’t afford a motorcycle, so I rode on the back of one or the other motorcycle. A little gasoline would go a long way, and we rode all over central Florida. Motorcycle safety had not yet been discovered. We rode wearing jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers, with no helmet, jacket, boots, or goggles. Of course, we often “spilled.” They taught me how to exit a falling motorcycle safely, and I never had a scratch in spite of many rolls in the road.

One of our favorite places to visit was Hillsboro River State Park, north of Tampa. The park still exists on the map, but now it must be a small island in a sea of ranch-style houses.In 1941, river and swamp extended well beyond the park. Tents with double-decker cots could be rented very cheaply, so we would go there during a spring break or in summer and stay several days, girls in one tent and boys in the next one. Hardly anyone else seemed to want to visit this primitive park and we mostly had it all to ourselves, day and night. Boats were available on the river, so we paddled around. Morgan claimed to be able to call alligators and produced in his throat a kind of grunt. I did not take that too seriously, but we went for a night paddle in total, swampy darkness with Morgan in the bow grunting. I paddled silently, feathering the paddle instead of bringing it out of water. As I paddled along in mid-river, my paddle unexpectedly struck something very firm, and an eruption of vigorous splashing immediately followed. My paddle had probably struck an alligator.

We walked through the swamp day and night on primitive paths. At night, we did not use, or even carry, flashlights. We were totally silent, listening for sounds of wildlife as we walked in the dark, feeling the smooth path with our bare feet in order to stay on course. Barred owls were hooting. Then from some distance a scream came out of the swamp. After a few minutes, the scream was repeated. It was the call of a panther. That was exciting, and we all wanted to get closer to it. Each night as we walked, we heard the screams but always at some distance. One night as I lay in my cot, I could hear the screams coming closer and closer. Finally the panther was outside the tent, a few feet away. I could hear a low, inhalent growl at the end of each scream. The screams became more distant as the panther continued down the river. That was as close as we got to the panther and we never saw it. At a later time, Betty had a summer job at the park and she actually saw a panther right in the administrative area in the daytime. By then Betty had said goodbye to me. Like Robin, I was courting too slow. I went off to the University of Michigan and said goodbye to Florida panthers.

In 1953, Janet and I bought a new Ford car–for cash, using Janet’s life savings up to that time. It replaced a 1942 U. S. Navy surplus Ford station wagon that was beyond further repair. With our new set of wheels we went to Boston for a meeting of AAAS, and the next spring we went on vacation to Florida. I wanted Janet to see some interesting places, one of which was the Everglades. At daybreak, we drove down the road to Flamingo on Florida Bay. As we drove slowly down the unpaved road through the lower Everglades, a panther stepped out into the road in front of us just a short distance ahead. It turned, walked down the road, and stepped back into the roadside thicket. That was an interesting part of Florida I had never expected to show Janet, and I, too, finally got to see a wild panther.

                           --Do not use or reproduce without permission--