Little wood boat still the one
Even though he makes a living as a fishing guide, Jeff Yates of Mount Pleasant can’t wait for things to slow down as winter approaches.
That’s because he gets to fish in his favorite boat.
No, the center console in which he carries his fishing parties isn’t No. 1. That honor belongs to a 13-foot, 6-inch wooden boat that’s been in his family for better than 30 years. It’s a Carolina-style skiff that’s probably had more fish come over its gunwales than any other that’s ever plied the waters around Charleston. “It’s extra special,” he said.
That’s because Yates got it from his father, David L. Yates, who had fished in it when it belonged to the late Hollis Gray, a legendary inshore fisherman in the 1960s and 1970s.
“They cost about $500, and it was a boat you could keep and fish a couple of years and then get rid of,” Jeff Yates said.
So what’s it doing with a trolling motor on its bow and a 25-hp outboard on its stern, at least 40 years after it was built? Call it an ongoing love affair between Jeff Yates and the boat.
“I fished in it with my dad growing up,” he said. “He got it in about 1980, when I was nine. He retired it in 1990. It’s been mine since 1999; I used to fish it a lot before I started chartering. I fish it every winter. I take my kids skiing in it. It’s about the right size to pull a 12-year-old.”
Skiing isn’t what the boat is about. David Yates said that Gray, a shipyard worker, bought the boat in Andrews and carried it everywhere that fish swam in the Charleston area. “I fished with Hollis Gray for years after I followed him around for about three years on the water, trying not to get too close to him,” David Yates said. “He was such a good fisherman, by the end of the day, he’d have 100 or 150 pounds of trout and (spot-tail) bass in the coolers. I was able to do that after fishing with him a couple of years. He showed me how to do it. I don’t think anybody was as good a fisherman as he was.”
Jeff Yates said his father was ahead of his time as an angler because of his relationship with Gray. “My dad idolized him. Dad never knew his real dad, and Hollis filled a part of what he should have had,” he said.
When Gray died in the late 1970s, David Yates arranged for a friend to buy the smaller boat from Gray’s estate. “He kept it a little while, but he didn’t use it very much, and he was going to sell it, so I bought it.”
David Yates had retired the little wooden boat for almost 10 years, kept it under a tarp in the yard, when Jeff asked for it. David said yes. Six months and $1,000 later, he had it ship-shape, having stripped 20 years of paint and varnish, replaced all the brass screws with stainless steel, countersunk them and capped them with little mahogany caps that matched the mahogany seats, rips and rails.
“I was heavy into my wood-working phase, and a friend of mine, Billy Freeman, a master boat-builder, came over and showed me how to fiberglass it. The rest was easy.”
You may have seen the little wooden boat. David Yates’ brother-in-law, an artist, painted the boat in a fishing scene and had prints made. David has the original. He gave Hollis Gray’s widow a print, and each member of the Yates family has one.
“I visited a hospital a while ago, and there was the print on the wall,” Jeff Yates said. “I said, ‘That’s my boat.’”
Like he said, it’s extra special.
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