0118-greenleaf_proof

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offshore. This happened quite a bit in
the ’70s. But this time, when the monkeys
saw the cattle getting prodded off
the boat? They ran for the masts, the
antennae, the highest spots they could
reach. They knew what was coming. And
Red and his boys knew it couldn’t keep
coming in this way. Not only was it inhumane
as shit, but how were they going
to answer to the dead cattle washing up
onshore?
This time, after loading up, Red told the
other captain not to pull this any more.
Back on the beach, Timmy and the guys
told their friends about these episodes—
at least 150 drowned cows a trip. “Damn,” they said,
“Y’all are some saltwater cowboys!” And so Tim Mc-
Bride earned his name—The Saltwater Cowboy.
How Tim became a pirate lord of pot goes like this.
Growing up in North Carolina and then Wisconsin,
Tim got a gig on the west coast before making his way
down to Florida, where he still lives today. Deeming
it “insider Hollywood bootlegging,” he would basically
smuggle films to celebrities before their release,
thanks to a connection to Sammy Davis, Jr. Not a fan
of commercials, Davis would pass off a TVguide to
Tim marked up with the shows he wanted to watch so
Tim could edit out the commercials. He did this for
a couple years, but being a manual Teevo didn’t seea
promising career path, so he returned to Wisconsin for
a month.
An old neighborhood friend Clark had a family connection
running the fish house on Chokoloskee Island
in Florida and invited Tim to head down there
with him, so he packed up and went for it. This was
a 129-acre island of about 500 people, where locals
were skeptical of outsiders and secrets were held tight.
Tim got a job building a house, and as time went by,
he built connections and had heard rumors of the pot
smuggling. They all seemed like ghost stories until he
literally woke up in an opportunity to go for it.
Clark, Tim’s childhood friend and neighbor, had
already been working on a stone crab boat with Captain
Red and a second-mate from Michigan—a guy
Red did not really know or trust. There was no one
Tim’s Chase Boat, Paradise. 33 ft. Chris Craft Scorpion 400 horse power.
It was used to run offshore along with the large loaded boats in case they
needed to escape when something showed up on the radar.
local to vouch for him. Red had been missing out on
the pot hauls and stone crabbing was hard work, so he
and Clark basically worked this guy from Michigan to
get him to want to quit. That was when Clark toldTim
there was an opening on their boat. Red and Tim hit it
off, and Tim went to work with them the next morning.
A day of stone crabbing starts around 3 or 4 in the
morning of course, at the first crack of dawn when
they could see the first buoy, because of the time it
takes to lay traps and pull the others. Red worked a
part of a fleet of 15 – 20 boats, the entire operation of
which pulled about 7000 traps a 10 day period. Red’s
crew would lay 700 traps here, 700 traps there, and
they were not going home until they had all 700 traps.
Timmy’s first morning waking up in the bunk though,
the sun was already up. He looked over to the Captain
in the wheelhouse, who swiveled his chair around and
said, “Well Timmy, we’re not going offshore today,
we’re not gonna pull traps. We’re just gonna hang out
here all day then go offshore in the afternoon and unload
a pot boat from Columbia.” Timmy, who did not
know about the 15 ton haul until he was already in it,
said, “Okay, cool!”
Stone crabbing went well with pot hauling because
of the rugged labor that comes with moving massive
quantities for transport. The crab traps had 4 inches of
concrete at the bottom, so when thrown off the boat,
they’d always land bottom-down, making them about
60 pounds each, just the traps. Each crewman handled