Big boat, bigger love

Many know John and Molly Nixon as the purveyors of some of the state’s freshest shrimp, which they net in the Gulf and sell by the pound at the dock in Port Aransas from their oversized shrimp boat, the Polly Anna.

But not generally known are the love story and the boat-building feat that lie behind each scoop of just-caught shrimp that Molly dips up for her customers from a 100-quart Yeti cooler while John is busy with repairs to the cables, nets and mechanisms that keep the Polly Anna ready for her next voyage.

‘He wa s the one’ It was back in the mid-1960s that John and Molly met.

They were an unlikely pair.

Molly was the 16-year-old daughter of a well-to-do Corpus Christi family that kept a summer home in Port Aransas.

“My parents wanted me to marry a doctor or a lawyer and to be a debutante,” Molly said.

John was a 21-year-old Port Aransas kid who had been hired to work on Molly’s father’s boat. He was dyslexic, had trouble with reading and writing, and had gone not to college but to welding school after high school.

John didn’t have the pedigree

Molly’s parents wanted — but Molly didn’t care.

“I knew that he was the one,” she said.

But because Molly’s folks totally forbade her to see John, she said, they had to “sneak around.”

In those days, there was a little place called Custard’s Last Stand, an ice cream and burger shop where the Venetian

Hot Plate is now. John and Molly met there and would drive along the beach drinking beer with his pals, sometimes cruising in her dad’s old Checker cab that had been converted into a beach buggy.

John was worried that Molly’s dad would catch them — and kill him. Molly said it took her three months for her to get John to hold her hand.

But “love grew,” she said.

The day she turned 18, they eloped.

“We high-tailed it to Mexico,” she said.

The family’s maid, Molly’s nanny, would tell her later that her father was hollerin’ mad, screaming and crying, when he found out that his little girl had run off and married John.

As man and wife, John and Molly moved around to the places his welding jobs took him.

He caught on for a while welding at the Reynolds Aluminum plant in Ingleside. Then it was off to Del Rio, where John worked as a welder on the Lake Amistad project. When that job was done, they headed to San Benito, where John helped build a power plant.

It was about that time, Molly said, that John’s dad started shrimping after a stint in the Coast Guard.

That’s when John got the idea to build his own shrimp boat.

At their four-acre place on Station Street in Port Aransas, John built the first Polly Anna, a 30-foot bay shrimper, named after their baby daughter.

But when he decided he wanted to fish the Gulf, he built the second Polly Anna, a 65-foot-long Gulf trawler.

Then he built an even bigger boat: an 80-footer, christened the Miss Molly for his wife.

Over the years, the Nixons suffered, along with other shrimpers, the economic hardships — much of it, they say, caused by government intervention — that came with their livelihood.

There were the headline making battles over the mandated use of Turtle Excluder Devices, which are troublesome and catch-reducing for shrimpers. There were the newly opened global markets that led to cheap imported shrimp at the same time skyrocketing fuel prices were driving up operating costs.

The Nixons witnessed the near-disappearance of the local shrimping fleet.

At one point, John and Molly tried “long line” fishing, searching the deep Gulf waters for swordfish to sell commercially. But that business crashed, too, when government regs were enacted that restricted their catch.

‘I just got carried away’

In the mid-‘80s, John decided to build the current Polly Anna.

Working with scrap steel salvaged from abandoned oil tanks, John said, he began to craft his 100-foot-long, 38-foot-wide shrimp ship.

“8,000 pounds of welding rods went in it,” John said. “I guess I just got carried away.”

When the hull of the ship was finished, he split it into two parts and moved the sections one-at-a-time down to the launching ramp at Dennis Dreyer Municipal Harbor, where he welded the halves back together.

The thing was so big, Molly said, it fit into the ramp with only a couple of inches to spare on either side.

They towed the hull to the dock near the city marina and pavilions — where it is now berthed — and John finished his masterpiece.

“He did the electrical, the plumbing, the motors,” Molly said.

About the only thing he didn’t do was the interior woodwork. A carpenter was brought in to handle that.

The Polly Anna is a floating second home for the Nixons. It has a full kitchen, a master bedroom with bath and a Lazy Boy recliner for a captain’s chair. It has big-screen TVs and walls hung with family photos. It can sleep eight.

“I still don’t believe he did it,” Molly said. “Even though he’s dyslexic, he overcompensated by being a genius with boats.”

The Polly Anna, completed in ’89, has since become a landmark on the Port Aransas waterfront.

‘As long as we can’

What’s next for the Nixons ?

Molly’s 68 now and John’s 72 — and they have no one waiting to take over the business.

“We’ll go on as long as we can do it,” John said.

They’ve invested in a boat-storage operation they can fall back on when that day finally comes.

“ That’ll be our retirement,” Molly said.

As for the Polly Anna, she’ll likely go on the worldwide market and be sold for a dive boat or some other such use.

But don’t expect Molly and John Nixon to become landlubbers.

“We love the water, both of us. When we go on vacations, we go on cruises,” Molly said.