News

By Willie Howard

    OCEAN RIDGE — Janet Hall, one of the first female boat captains in South Florida and co-founder of the Sea Mist drift fishing business in Boynton Beach, died Sept. 16 at her home in Ocean Ridge.
    She was 96.
    Born in Cortland, N.Y. in 1917, Mrs. Hall moved to Miami with her parents as a young girl. She fell in love with swimming and diving and joined a city swim team called the Water Rats. As a teenager, Mrs. Hall took a job as a “mermaid” for a glass-bottom boat tour operator in Fort Lauderdale, where she put on an underwater show and collected sea fans from the ocean for tourists.
    After encountering a large grouper in the water one day, Mrs. Hall decided she would rather run the boat than dive under it. She took her place at the helm and became one of South Florida’s first female boat captains, if not the first.
    The Coast Guard issued Mrs. Hall a captain’s license in March 1940, her family said.
    Mrs. Hall met and married fisherman Dan Garnsey in the 1940s and worked with him to establish the Helen S fishing business in Pompano Beach, which is still operated by her grandchildren.
    After having three children, Mrs. Hall divorced Garnsey in the 1950s and married Wendall Hall. The Halls moved their blended family of seven children, along with Mrs. Hall’s orphaned nephew, to Boynton Beach. The family lived on 50 acres “west of town” off Military Trail and ran cattle on the land before moving east to a home on State Road A1A in Ocean Ridge.
    They bought the first Sea Mist II drift fishing boat, a wooden boat, in 1956 and began offering ocean fishing trips to the public from Boynton Beach.
    The Halls purchased what is now Boynton Harbor Marina, named it Sea Mist Marina, and made it into a full-service marina with boat storage, fuel and repair services. The family moved into a small two-story building at the marina in the early 1970s, where Mrs. Hall’s daughter, Judi Garnsey Andrews, remembers dipping shrimp for customers as a girl.
    The Halls eventually sold the marina to the city. But the Sea Mist III fishing boat, run by Mrs. Hall’s grandchildren, still sails daily from the marina on East Ocean Avenue.
    “Their family was one of the first families of fishing in Boynton Beach,” friend Harvey E. Oyer III said. “They probably introduced hundreds of thousands of people to Gulf Stream fishing.”
    Despite being one of the few, if not the only, woman at the helm of large commercial boats in South Florida, Mrs. Hall said during a February interview that she was always treated with “a great deal of respect” by other boat captains.
    Mrs. Hall and her husband, who died in 1994, helped start the First Church of Christian Science in Boynton Beach in the 1950s. Family members said Mrs. Hall followed her Christian Science faith and lived free of conventional medicine.
    She was an avid reader who enjoyed keeping up with the latest technology. She used an iPad to play crossword puzzles and answer emails in recent years, family members said.
    In addition to working in the fishing business, Mrs. Hall operated the Victorian Parlor vintage bookstore on East Ocean Avenue until 1999.
    Mrs. Hall is survived by six children and stepchildren, including Capt. Tom Hall of Pompano Beach; Capt. Bark Garnsey of New Mexico; Wendy Hall Bensol of New York; Nancy Hall Garnsey of Ocean Ridge; John Hall of Tennessee; and Judith Garnsey Andrews of Ocean Ridge.
    She has 15 grandchildren, 25 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.
    The family is planning a celebration-of-life service for Mrs. Hall aboard the Sea Mist III in November.
    In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that contributions be made in Mrs. Hall’s name to the charity of the donor’s choice.