The next morning before the sun was up I went down to the harbor, walked out to my boat with something under my arm, and set it flat on the harbormaster’s counter before he’d even gotten his coffee poured — the original slip lease, framed behind glass, that I’d signed with the marina’s founding owner back in 1983.
Old Cap Guidry built that marina from a fish house and a single floating dock, and he’d insisted on writing every working boat’s lease himself, longhand, because he didn’t trust lawyers to understand what a shrimp boat actually meant to a harbor like ours. Mine had a clause in it most folks never noticed, tucked in under the rate schedule — a grandfathered working-vessel protection, guaranteeing my slip at the original commercial rate for as long as I held a valid commercial fishing license, binding on any future owner of that marina under the state’s Working Waterfront preservation statute, which exists specifically so towns like Gulfport don’t lose every last shrimper to a marina full of sportfishers.
Cap had added one line himself at the bottom in his own hand, decades before he passed, and I read it out loud to that young harbormaster standing there in his pressed polo shirt. “As long as you’re pulling shrimp for this town, this slip is yours at the rate we agreed the day we shook hands, no matter whose name ends up on the ownership papers after me.”
He tried telling me the marina’s new corporate owners weren’t bound by some handshake deal from forty years back. I told him it wasn’t a handshake anymore, it was recorded with the county and cited by statute number, and he might want to call his own legal department before he zip-tied anything else to my cleat. He did call, right there in front of me, and I watched his face change about halfway through the conversation.
Turned out the marina’s liability insurance required compliance with exactly that working-waterfront statute as a condition of their coastal development permit, something nobody on the new ownership side had apparently bothered to read before deciding my boat was bad for the image. Forcing me out wouldn’t have just been unkind. It would’ve put their whole permit at risk.
The young harbormaster came down to my boat himself two days later, not with another notice, but with an apology and a fresh coat of white paint for my cleat, since the old one had rusted through years back and nobody had ever gotten around to it. He asked, a little sheepish, if I’d be willing to show him and a few of the newer captains where the real sandbars were, the ones that don’t show up on any chart plotter. I told him I’d been waiting forty-one years for somebody at that marina to finally ask the right question instead of just complaining about the boat.