Esperanza’s Launch

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The view from Ralph Woodring’s house, close by the sandy shore on the north side of Sanibel Island, Florida, is of sparkling San Carlos Bay. There’s a little scrub-covered island out there, and beyond it in the distance, the green and red buoys marking the Intracoastal Waterway. On weekends the Waterway hosts an endless parade of noisy powerboats but on this calm midweek morning in late March, the bay is largely undisturbed and ripples with a pleasant whisper against the pilings of Ralph’s dock.

Close your eyes and it is not hard to imagine that the view from here isn’t too much different from what it was in 1888. That is when Ralph’s grandfather Sam, a Pennsylvania blacksmith and Union Army veteran, established a homestead on Sanibel. His son, also named Sam, built the sturdy house of rot-resistant Florida pine in 1918.

The house has been fixed up as needed after confronting more than a century of hurricanes. Since being pushed off its foundation during the storm surge of Hurricane Ian in 2022, the house now stands 6′ farther back from shore than it did before. But it’s still there, where it belongs, stout and defiant. This thumb-like protrusion into the bay is named for the Woodring family. You’ll find it on nautical chart 11427 and others of the waters around Florida’s west coast barrier islands. On Sanibel this place is known as Woodring Point, although the chart adds an “s,” making it “Woodrings Point.”

Woodring Point is where Ralph, born in 1937, grew up. It is where he still lives with his wife, Jean, and all his memories of now long-gone island characters, the fishermen and netmakers, the bootleggers, lighthouse keepers, and hotel owners. But most of all, Ralph’s thoughts remain dominated by fishing, by boats, and by how folks got by in the old days that seem at once so recent and so long ago.

“It was people making a living,” Ralph said of the decades before the 3-mile causeway from the mainland opened in May 1963. The causeway changed everything except the islanders’ efforts to preserve Sanibel as a wildlife refuge and defend it against uncontrolled development. Before the causeway, winter visitors arrived on small ferries from Punta Rassa. They settled into one of the island’s little guest houses, went shelling on the famous beaches, admired birds of all sorts, and hired fishing guides to take them into the mangrove-fringed waters from Woodring Point up to Captiva and beyond or out into the Gulf of Mexico.

“Nobody got rich,” Ralph said of those times, “but they fed their families.”

The details of Esperanza’s first launch are readily apparent here.

When Ralph’s father died at 62 in 1942, the challenge of feeding the family fell to his 41-year-old wife, Esperanza, a fisherman’s daughter, one of 12 kids born on the barrier island of Cayo Costa, west of Fort Myers. The widow measured her challenge. She had herself and two young sons to feed. But she had the sturdy house. She had Sam’s beautifully maintained gill nets, each with a specific mesh size and depth and a hand-tied lead line to weight it down, and floats. There were also cast nets that Esperanza could toss with a ballet-like grace, and 16′- to 18′-long bamboo fishing poles. Besides the gear, Esperanza also possessed an intimate knowledge of all the fish species found in those parts, where they’d be according to the season, the tides, the winds.

“Just about any fish you could think of in the Gulf came here to spawn, and they still do,” Ralph said, “and their eggs also just drift in. There’s mullet, red fish, trout, snapper, grouper, cobia, catfish, pompano, tarpon, and snook.”

Fishing with a simple bamboo fishing pole.

Not long after her husband’s death, Esperanza sold the hefty 23′ powerboat he’d owned, an open boat capable, if you were knowledgeable and careful about weather, of crossing the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas on occasional bootlegging runs. Its replacement was an entirely different sort of boat: a flat-bottomed 16-footer with an inboard motor and a live well. It had been built across the bay on the Caloosahatchee River in Iona. In the years to come, Esperanza Woodring would use this boat and others to prove to herself and to all who knew her that she could feed her family. As the years passed and her fishing and guiding skills became widely known, Esperanza Woodring became a legend in her own time.

In 1887, under the direction of ichthyologist George Brown Goode, the Government Printing Office released Section II of its monumental The Fisheries and Fishing Industry of the United States. Much like census-takers, those gathering information traveled far and wide to record in detail America’s fisheries, the various species caught in each place and in what quantities, the methods and equipment used, and the sorts of boats employed.

By the late 19th century, the highly localized design of American fishing craft was reflected in their names, often that of a specific town or body of water. To cite but a few, there were the Friendship sloop in Maine, the Hampton Boat of New Hampshire, the Cape Cod catboat of Massachusetts, the Noank sloop in Connecticut, the Chesapeake Bay skipjack and crabbing skiff, and the North Carolina shad boat (see WB No. 309).

If there was one boat whose general pattern was most widespread, it was probably the flat-bottomed skiff. Goode’s study included descriptions of skiffs in a variety of places. Of the Delaware Bay-style boats, he noted: They “are the ordinary sharp-bowed, wide-sterned, flat-bottom skiff [varying] in length from 12 to 20 feet. . . They are built almost exclusively by the fishermen themselves.”

In Florida, Goode’s researchers chronicled fishing craft, including those from Key West around into the Gulf of Mexico and on up the coast to the barrier islands—Cayo Costa; Gasparilla; and Sanibel’s neighbor Captiva, where Theodore Roosevelt came in 1917 to harpoon huge but gentle “devil rays,” as manta rays were known. The place closest to Sanibel whose skiffs Goode described was Charlotte Harbor on the mainland.

“They are built to carry a large load in shallow water…having planks of white cedar or white pine…knees and timbers rather large and fashioned of white oak, and fastened with galvanized iron…. In shape they are somewhat awkward, being full at bow and stern, flat-bottomed, stem and stern raking….”

The fact is that the seemingly humble flat-bottomed skiff evolved variously, and this was certainly true of the Sanibel boats. There, even the nomenclature for what most would simply term a flat-bottomed skiff had a local twist. Boats that would be propelled by a poling oar were referred to as skiffs but those equipped with engines, such as Esperanza’s new boat, were called launches.

“The launch would tow the poling skiffs,” Ralph remembers, “sometimes five or six of them out to where the nets would be set in Tarpon Bay or San Carlos Bay. The skiffs had a small skeg so they would tow straight. The launches had a deeper skeg through which the propeller shaft passed.”

None of those boats survive except in Ralph’s memory. A typical Sanibel-style skiff or launch of the 1930s to 1950s was 14′ to 18′ long, had a foredeck, low freeboard, and a cross-planked bottom. The boats were built principally of cypress, which is much prized for its durability, although the magnificent, old-growth trees had largely disappeared by the 1920s and survive today only in protected areas. “There were sawmills in North Ft. Myers and in the Everglades area,” Ralph recalls. “A builder could go over and select the timber he wanted.”

Esperanza could fit a steering wheel to her launch when taking clients fishing.

Whether launch or skiff, these flat-bottomed craft were intended principally for use inshore, where depths over wide areas in Tarpon Bay, San Carlos Bay, and Pine Island Sound range from 1′ to 4′ at low tide. They were low-sided boats built generally with two planks per side. “As big cypress trees got more scarce,” Ralph said, “planks about 15″ wide were typical. The boats were seaworthy enough for the mangroves, for close inshore.”

The transom and frames were sawn at an angle that made it easy to set a gill net as the skiff was skillfully poled along. The low freeboard enabled nets to be hauled conveniently aboard. This was important, considering a gill netter might, on a good set, haul 200 or 300 lbs of mullet aboard.

The skiffs had other features adapted for their intended purpose. Cypress rails were fastened several inches below the gunwales to the hull’s frames, which were spaced 18″ to 24″ apart. To make the rails flexible enough to follow the hull’s curves, the wood was soaked for a few days before being installed. “There was no steam-bending,” Ralph notes.

Easily removed boards were placed athwartships on these rails, allowing the fisherman to walk forward and aft as he poled the skiff along. The boards could also be left in place to protect the fish from the hot sun until the catch was offloaded. A foredeck served to keep some things dry and to house a Navy-style anchor. At the stern, a “net table” of planks was installed on which the neatly piled nets were kept together with a “let-go anchor,” as Ralph calls it. “The end of the gill net was fastened to the let-go anchor, which was a hunk of lead and wood that you’d toss into the roots of the mangrove.”

These Sanibel poling skiffs and launches, and the various nets they carried, were the basis for a well-established local economy. “There were three things my dad said that you needed to go fishing,” Ralph said. “You needed a jug of water, nets, and a poling oar. One fisherman here never had a motor in his boat. He made a living simply with his pole skiff. He gill-netted for mullet, red fish and, sometimes, pompano, which commanded a high price.”

The launches that Ralph knew as a boy were often powered by a Palmer 1-cylinder marine engine, a “one-lunger.” But the boat Esperanza bought after her husband’s death was equipped with a single-cylinder, 6-hp, air-cooled Briggs & Stratton.

Although today one may associate Briggs & Stratton primarily with its small lawnmower engines, the company produced a dizzying variety of models. A few, aimed at marine use, had base plates for bolting to engine bedlogs. These engines, which had belt-driven gear boxes, were almost certainly less expensive than purpose-built, water-cooled marine engines, and they enjoyed some popularity. Yacht designer William Atkin even drew and sold plans, which are still available from Mystic Seaport Museum, for what he called the MotoSkiff. This was a 16′×5′ V-bottomed “utility” skiff for plywood construction intended to be powered by the Briggs AMT marine model, now a rare find for collectors. He reminded builders that the “motor must be open fore and aft to permit free circulation of air; it will get too hot if closed in.”

The Briggs in the Woodring boat was direct drive. “You started it,” Ralph remembers, “by wrapping a 5′-long rope around a pulley mounted on the flywheel. It wasn’t too easy to pull that rope, but it wasn’t too hard, either.”

While air-cooling saved the complication of a water pump and the associated plumbing and expense, it meant the engine was continuously exposed to salt air. “It was always damp,” Ralph remembers, “so mom kept the spark plug ashore in a can of gasoline. She’d heat that [plug] up and after she reinstalled the plug, the engine started easily every time.”

Although the 16-footer was adequate for commercial fishing, it eventually proved a bit small to be comfortable for guide use when as many as four winter visitors might be aboard. Around 1950, a Woodring neighbor decided his skiff had outlived its usefulness and offered it to Esperanza. She then hired a lanky, self-taught, island boatbuilder named Eldon “Dad” White to use what he could of the old boat and build her a comparatively beamy 18-footer.

“He used the cypress planks from the old skiff for the sides and cypress-planked the bottom fore-and-aft,” Ralph said. “Dad didn’t believe in cross-planked bottoms. The topsides were put together with galvanized nails but he used copper nails for the bottom.”

Since the new skiff had been built of both repurposed and new material, the name came naturally: SCRAPS. Painted white with green trim and red antifouling, SCRAPS, like her smaller predecessor, was a handsome boat.

The steering arrangement on these launches was the simplest possible. The boats had a transom-mounted rudder operated by lines running through holes in the transom. Blocks mounted port and starboard on the hull opposite the engine allowed the steering lines to make right-angle turns. Esperanza ran the boat while sitting by the engine holding the lines in each hand with the throttle close by. “The tiller ropes were always in the way when she had clients,” Ralph recalls. “That’s why, on SCRAPS, there was also provision for a steering wheel.”

Like the older boat, SCRAPS had sockets mounted in the stern to accommodate galvanized steel pipes on which two removable wooden chairs were fitted for the guests. “Both her motorboats had false bottoms [floorboards] so people didn’t get their feet wet,” Ralph said.

Esperanza had had negative experiences with the reliability of an outboard-powered boat, recalling that “it broke down up at Matlacha,” a tiny fishing community about 12 miles north of Woodring Point. “And after that she wouldn’t touch an outboard again for years,” Ralph said. SCRAPS would have an inboard engine. Doubtless to economize, the engine installed was not a marine engine but one of the early 44-cu-in 261⁄2-hp units from a tiny Crosley automobile. Having made a fortune building radios and home appliances, Powel Crosley of Cincinnati, Ohio, introduced his little, affordable car in 1946 with ads aimed to attract the “Forgotten Man.”

In fact, the engine was so unusual that it was patented. Rather than having the typical iron block and cylinder head, the Crosley COBRA—“copper brazed”—had a block made of 120 steel stampings. The stampings were joined by precise fits and spot welds after which all the joints were coated with a copper paste. Then the block was brazed in a specially constructed furnace. This engine had an aluminum crankcase and was notably light weight. It had a performance-enhancing, overhead-cam layout, which was quite advanced at that time.

But there were problems. Although the engine had proved durable as a generator during the war, in automotive use electrolysis soon appeared, creating ¹⁄₃₂″ and ¹⁄₆₄″ holes in the cylinders. The problem was created at least in part by antifreeze solutions that had sodium in them. The implications for a Crosley engine were predictable in a saltwater environment. While Crosley switched to a cast-iron block, Esperanza’s engine was replaced by a stout, four-cylinder Kermath.

It is no easy thing today to imagine the central economic and lifestyle role played by the island’s skiffs and launches during the decades before and after World War II. Skiffs loaded so heavily with fish that they occasionally sank would be towed to fish houses perched atop pilings in the waters from Boca Grande to Sanibel. At the fish house, the fisherman received a ticket stating the value of what he’d landed.

“The Punta Gorda Fish Company [1897–1977],” said Ralph, “had wooden boats to bring ice to the fish houses on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The fish houses were managed by at least one person residing in the structure year-round. Each fish boat was manned by a captain and an engineer and equipped with a winch with tongs to unload 300-lb blocks of ice into an insulated hold in the fish house. Iced catches were loaded onto the boat via a wooden chute for the return trip to Punta Gorda. Before ice became available, the catch was dried or brined and packed in barrels for shipment.”

The Punta Gorda fish boat would also bring groceries, engine parts, or other necessities that the fisherman had ordered. Their value would be deducted from the value of his ticket. The next boat would bring his money. It was a successful economic arrangement that lasted, with inevitable changes in the sorts of boats used, until commercial gill netting was outlawed in 1995.

The Sanibel of the pre- and post-war years into the 1960s was a comparatively wild place, a fact that both enhanced and challenged Esperanza’s efforts to get by. On the plus side, in 1945 the federal government purchased thousands of acres around Tarpon Bay to create a wildlife refuge. The refuge is named for the conservationist Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling, a Pulitzer Prize–winning political cartoonist for The Des Moines Register who wintered on Captiva and Sanibel. He was appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt as the first director of what became the National Fish and Wildlife Service; the refuge named in his honor remains an important attraction for birding, alligator-watching, and fishing.

Access to Woodring Point today is still only a narrow dirt lane right beside San Carlos Bay; in Esperanza’s time it was limited to a trail that was regularly destroyed by hurricanes, and the island’s roads were few and most had yet to be paved. Small boats were thus a practical means of getting around; however, where the guests would meet Esperanza took planning. “The hotels would pack a lunch basket for the guests, and mom would pick them up at the Bailey General Store dock where the mailboat came,” Ralph said.

How the guests planned their visits also required forethought. Electricity didn’t come to the island until 1942. “Before the phone,” Ralph said, “people would send letters well in advance of their vacation and set up times for fishing trips. Most would want to go out twice a week. The business progressed slowly by whatever means necessary.”

Ralph describes his mother’s typical day as a fishing guide this way: “Mom would fish them all day. They’d start out in the morning trolling with spoons for redfish and trout, but if the tide was very low and they couldn’t troll, she’d find where to go and fish for sheepshead using fiddler crabs as bait. By lunch time they’d have plenty of fish. If the guests wanted, they’d stop for lunch and relax. Mom would build a fire around a couple of bricks. She had a frying pan and would fry the fresh catch. Or they’d roast oysters they’d gather in the mangroves.”

The extensive shallows around Sanibel Island.

As the years passed and Esperanza’s clientele grew, she sold SCRAPS and replaced it with a succession of plywood skiffs with fiberglassed bottoms and bait wells. These boats were built in Longwood, which is near Orlando, by the Courtney Boat Company (not to be confused with Courtney Craft of Ontario, Canada). In a February 1960 report, the Tampa Bay Times quoted a local rental-boat operator as saying, “A spray rail provides eye appeal and does an effective job of curbing spray. The Courtney fishing boat takes turns without undue slippage and is dry…fishermen have been waiting for just such a plain, solid boat that can be trusted in reasonable waters.”

“There was a lot less upkeep to the plywood boats,” Ralph said. “They were lighter, and you could bring them right onto the beach on rollers, block them up, and do maintenance. We’d turn them over to work on the bottom.”

A heavy boat such as SCRAPS was pushed ashore sideways at high tide and then blocked up for maintenance. Typical jobs included replacing the steering ropes as they wore out, replacing worn-out or broken transom-mounted eyebolts that were part of the steering system hardware, adjusting the stuffing box and, from time to time, replacing the skeg as it wore down from frequent grounding on the sandy bottom.

The Courtney boats were outboard-powered, and Esperanza learned to handle and trust the Johnsons or Evinrudes she used, replacing her first pull-start model with electric-start for convenience. She continued fishing for years, sometimes taking a nap on the stern seat next to the red, white, and blue cowl of her 33-hp Evinrude. “She said she’d damn well keep going out as long as she could,” her son remembered, “and she fished commercially into her 70s.”

Although Esperanza gained widespread renown, she avoided granting interviews to local newspapers. She once told a curious reporter from The News-Press of Fort Myers that “she didn’t like to talk about her private life and she really didn’t know that she’d accomplished a whole lot to talk about.”

Esperanza Woodring died in 1992 at 91. But long before that, Priscilla Murphy, the island’s first professional realtor and a close friend of the Woodrings, had noted: “All our fishing guides are gentlemen, except one, and she’s a lady.”

Stan Grayson is a regular contributor to WoodenBoat. He sends special thanks to Ralph and Jean Woodring; Betty Anholt and the staff at the Sanibel Public Library; and Ann-Marie Wildman and Jeff Decker at the “Ding” Darling Wildlife Society (dingdarlingsociety.org).

The inshore fishing craft of Sanibel Island

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