Not many fishermen spend a career of close to 60 years on the same boat. Seventy-three-year-old Johnny Bennett of Brunswick, Ga., started working on the Dora F in the late 1960s and bought the boat when he was 16 years old.

In late September 2024, Hurricane Helene tore through Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, leaving $78 billion in destruction in its wake. Among the losses was Johnny Bennett's Dora F. "We had it tied up nice to another boat, and we figured it was alright," says Jonathan Bennett, Johnny's grandson, who started running the boat when he was 17. "My grandfather bought another boat, the Flying Cloud, and was working on it and couldn't run the Dora F. I asked him who was going to run it, and he said, 'You are.'" Jonathan ran the boat, as well as the Flying Cloud at times, for 10 years, until Helene hit. "That night, we tied it to another boat, but that other boat sank, and ours tore away and drifted down the river. The wind just rolled it over, and it sank in 50 feet of water."

As Jonathan describes it, they were able to raise the 65-foot shrimp boat but couldn't get it to a safe place. "We got a couple of barges down there in October and lifted it with cranes, but the Coast Guard wouldn't let us take it across the channel at that time. It was too much weight for the cranes to hold it all night, so we had to set it down on bottom again. The next day, we tried lifting her again, but it was too much, and the straps tore right through her."

They ended up taking the boat out of the water in pieces that they hauled to the dump, and such was the end of the 69-year-old shrimper that Johnny Bennett had spent most of his life on.

"And we had just repowered it," says Jonathan. "It had a different engine to start with, but most of the time he had it, it had a 300-hp 343 Caterpillar from before I was born, and we put in a 500-hp 346, with a brand new gear and wheel."

The Bennetts had also installed a new suite of electronics. "I don't remember the models, my log book went down with the boat, but it was all Furuno: radar, sounder, Navnet. She was like a yacht, brand new everything."

MORE THAN A BOAT

Before the hurricane, Jonathan had pretty much taken over running the boat, and he took his grandfather as crew. "We were day fishing," he says. "We would go out and make one or two tows." On the Dora F, the Bennetts pulled four 40-foot nets with 6-40 doors. "Or sometimes we'd pull two 60-foot nets," says Jonathan. "In winter, if we only make one tow, and it takes us an hour to get back to the dock, those shrimp have only been out of the water an hour and a half. We're funny about quality. We don't sell anything we wouldn't want to eat. We put a tarp over them and keep water on them. In summer, we bring ice. Where we sell, they always put our shrimp right out front."

The Bennetts sell to City Market in Brunswick, and being a day boat, they get a lot of exposure. They also do tours for a nearby resort. According to Walker Owens, whose family has operated City Market Seafood in Brunswick for five generations, the Dora F was more than just a fishing boat; she was a point of pride in the community. "We all loved that boat," Owens says. "Johnny always had the outriggers and trim painted orange, so she stood out."

City Market sells seafood to the nearby Sea Island Resort, and Owens recalls that when the resort wanted a boat to take people out and show them the local waters, he recommended the Dora F. "They did that for about three years, until she sank, and now they do it with the Dora F II."

Owens is something of an unofficial historian on the Dora F. "I'm friends with Madison Finn, whose grandfather, Hugh Finn, had the boat built in 1955 in St. Augustine, when Desco was building wooden boats. She is hull number 533. He named it after his wife, Dora F. They took it to St. Mary's, Georgia, and fished it for about ten years, and then sold it to Ed Wallace. Johnny Bennett worked on it for him and became captain of the boat when he was 15, and bought it from him when he was around 16."

The boat was also where Johnny raised his two children as a single father, Owens reports. "There is a stool up front that was saved when the boat sank that his daughter, [Jonathan's mother], would stand on and drive the boat when she was a little kid. Jonathan was raised working on the boat too, and now brings his 10-year-old son Mason along."

According to Owens, Johnny took the Dora F to Two-Way Fish Camp in Darien, Georgia, around 1983 and had major work done on her. "They took everything off her and fiberglassed over the wood." Records from DESCO indicate the boat's original length was 55 feet, and Owens adds that the Dora F was also lengthened at Two-Way Fish Camp and repowered with the 343 Cat. According to Owens, Johnny had been planning another overhaul. "The Dora F was an eggshell. He was going to take all the wood out from inside and make it all fiberglass. But he didn't get to it," he says.

"After she broke up, the Dora F was taken to a boat dismantling yard about 500 yards from where it sank," says Owens. "When they started tearing it apart, Johnny was down there watching, and I just couldn't imagine what he was thinking. One night, I went down there and got a bunch of wood from the original timbers and had a guy make three frames for pictures I'd taken. I also managed to find the original brass controls still mounted on the console. Johnny said he would never replace them with anything modern. Lying about 5 feet away was a wrench that fit — a one in 1 million chance — so I was able to take them off. I cleaned them up and gave them to him for Christmas that year."

THE DORA F II

"My Papa, he just couldn't stand not having a boat to go shrimping with," says Jonathan. "So, we found this boat. It's smaller than what we're used to, but I bought it. With this one, we tow two 45-foot nets, with 6-32 doors."

The pedigree of the new boat is uncertain. "I don't know too much about this little thing," says Jonathan, speaking from the wheelhouse one morning as he and Johnny towed their nets. "We had to do a lot of work on her. She had sunk, and they had rebuilt the engine some, but they just left her for two years. We put her on the rails for two months at City Market. I took three shrimp baskets of old wire out of her. I told them take it all, I didn't want one old wire in there. We cut new windows in her, moved the winches, and lengthened the wheelhouse. We had to get new injectors and a few other things for the engine. My father is a Caterpillar diesel mechanic, and we did all our own work on the other boats, but this one has a Detroit 671, and I had to get a friend to help me."

After years with a four-cycle Cat, Jonathan is adjusting to the Detroit 6-71, two-cycle engine. "I can't even hear you without my headphones on," he says. "The Flying Cloud had two engines, and you could go down in the engine room and have a conversation. The 671 runs like a sewing machine now, but really, I'm not a fan."

The Dora F was not insured, and the Bennetts had to replace the electronics suite out of pocket. "We went with Furuno again, as much as we could. The sounder is Garmin; I got it on eBay. And the VHF is United. The radar is a Furuno 24-inch, and we have TimeZero Navnet on a PC." Jonathan also has a Simrad autopilot, which he says is the best autopilot he has ever used.

After almost a year of fishing the Dora F II, he and his grandfather are going strong. "He runs the boat now, and I pick the deck," says Jonathan, whose wife gave birth to their third child in January 2026. Another generation of Bennetts appears ready to grow up on the family shrimp boat.