Living the easy life on a houseboat

Living the easy life on a houseboat
By MIKE CUMMINGS

Billy Joe Johnson, an avid hunter and fisherman, decorates his houseboat with dead animals.

Galleries of antlers, assorted skulls and other bones adorn the outside.

Inside, two snapping turtle shells bigger than dinner platters hang over a sofa. A mounted boar's head keeps watch from the opposite wall.

A photo album sits on a coffee table near the sofa. Johnson opens it and points to a picture of him straddling the back of an enormous snapping turtle. The monster is craning its neck and stretching its jaws, ready to take off some fingers, or an arm.

"I rode him for a week before I slaughtered him and ate him," Johnson said.

JOHN FITZHUGH
Billy Joe Johnson relaxes on his houseboat with Pat Peyton of Pascagoula, one of several friends who had come by to visit Johnson and enjoy the hospitality he offers at his houseboat on the Pascagoula River in Jackson County.

Johnson, 63, retired to his houseboat on the Pascagoula River nine years ago.

"I told my wife I was going to the houseboat and she could come with me if she wanted," he said.

When he isn't hunting, fishing or sleeping, Johnson spends much of his time preparing his quarry for the dinner table. He grinds his own sausages. A freezer on the houseboat contains butchered meats. He cans a lot of meat "in case a hurricane hits."

Friends and family often stop by for a meal.

"It ain't nothing for me to feed 40 people in a week," he said.

Johnson served fried catfish, hush puppies and lima beans in gravy to a group of buddies on a mild afternoon in September.

The men sat on the beat-up, comfortable couches on the deck eating and watching the river pass by.

A former maintenance technician at the Rohm and Haas chemical plant, Johnson has rigged his houseboat with several contraptions, including an irrigation system that pumps river water to his small vegetable garden on the boat's deck.

He also built a motorized system to carry sewage up the steep bank to a septic tank. Many houseboats on the river lack proper septic systems and dump raw waste into the water.

He said life on the houseboat is not complicated.

"You have three decisions to make every morning: Do I go up the river, down the river or do I stay in bed?" he said. "If it's raining, I stay in bed."