The Amazing Crawfish Boat by John Laudun

Author:John Laudun [Laudun, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Folklore & Mythology, History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Technology & Engineering, Fisheries & Aquaculture, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781496804211
Google: fwIfDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Published: 2016-03-29T04:08:53+00:00

Later boats by Harold Benoit used a simple piece of heavy steel plate cut into a triangle that could easily be mounted to the front of a boat. Note the use of commercial boat hulls. Photo courtesy of the Benoit family.

A year passed and then, in the fall of 1982, Benoit went to the first crawfish field day organized by his friend and fellow vocational agriculture teacher, Louis Cramer. On the day of the demonstration by Amos Roy of his crawfish buggy, Benoit remembers seeing what he called “the first combine that anybody had ever seen.” He was looking at Ted Habetz’s boat. Admiring what Habetz had done, Benoit recognized that he and Habetz had been working along similar lines, but that Habetz, more experienced in hydraulics, had worked out the gear ratios to make it work.

No one at that first crawfish field day on that crisp October day in 1982 had any idea that the region’s entire economy was about to be changed; they only knew that someone had a working solution to a long-standing problem. But a reliably mechanized boat would significantly change the scale of everything they were doing.

By the following fall, Benoit had a working boat in the field. It was built with new parts for the hydraulic system, and he fabricated the additional steel structure he needed: the leftover plow that had been the original arm holding the wheel out in front of the boat was replaced with a triangular tongue of heavy sheet steel that was hinged at the bow. All the important pieces of the contemporary boat appear to have been in place: a high-RPM, small-bore engine drove a hydraulic pump that delivered, simultaneously, power to a ram that turned the boat and power to a hydraulic motor that moved it.

Most important, Benoit had a working boat in the field. It wasn’t long before he had cars and trucks lined up along the roads that bordered the fields he worked to see what was either a crazy contraption or a crawfish combine, depending upon whom you asked. Farmers showed up in carloads to watch Benoit run his traps. As they watched, they counted traps, pounds, and hours, and the dollar signs piled up like the sacks of crawfish on the bow of Benoit’s boat. When he came out of the field, farmers would tell him, “I gotta have that boat.”

Benoit declined, “No, I’ll tell you how to make one.”

After one of these first days of spectating, one farmer came back. Bill Krielow told Benoit: “I want three, and I’ll write you a check before you buy the first part.” Benoit replied that there was no schedule. Krielow’s response was that Benoit could make them when he had the time.

“Okay,” Benoit said. “I’ll build you one and see how it goes.”

By the time he had built Krielow’s first boat, another farmer, Larry Lyons, wanted one, and so did somebody else down in Gueydan. Looking back, Benoit commented, “And it just snowballed.” In the end,

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