A fisherman trades his tackle for earthquake relief efforts
By Andy Olsen, NWHCM Media Director
Port Canaveral, FL — David Bates’ friends say he made things stink here. Bates thought it smelled like money.
The local seafood baron in his heyday, Bates owned a small fleet of shrimp- and scallop-laden boats that once dotted this bay. His company’s property was visible from almost any spot along the water in Port Canaveral. The shells spit out by his processing plant piled up so high that today they form part of the city’s coastline.
That was before plummeting seafood prices, soaring energy costs, and real estate-hungry cruise lines pushed Bates and his wife, Lisa, to retire. They sold most of their shrimp boats, trusty white workhorses that had literally fished the world.
“It got to the point where we could buy shrimp from Asia, ship it here, package it, and resell it for cheaper than we could sell our shrimp,” said Lisa, who is was also Bates’ business partner. “We said we would never do that.”
Instead, they found themselves looking for something to do with the shrimp boats they could not sell. When a devastating earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on January 12, and damaged the Caribbean nation’s main seaport, David felt led to load one of his boats with relief supplies and sail it to Haiti.
And so began a partnership with Northwest Haiti Christian Mission to deliver food and other badly needed supplies to Haiti’s northern coast. Through a series of connections at his church, First Christian Church of Merritt Island, Bates was put in touch with NWHCM and began retrofitting one of his ships, the Capt. Scott B., to haul cargo to Haiti.
Donated goods from across the country started rolling into a NWHCM warehouse in Port Canaveral. On February 22, Bates and his crew began a two-week process of loading the ship. On March 9, it sailed into Port-de-Paix and crews unloaded more than half a million meals of relief food, generators, barrels full of medicine and medical supplies, and hundreds of water filtration systems.
“I’ve always thought God has blessed me and my family beyond my dreams,” David told Florida Today, a local newspaper. “I figure we could give something back. It thrills me to be able to do it.”
A special thanks to NWHCM staff and missionaries Cameron Mayhill and Mike and Teresa Grant for helping coordinate the effort.
Tags: News_DisasterRelief, News_General
