Wild Caught Transcript
- [Matthew] At North Topsail Beach, North Carolina, I first started watching the boats trawling for shrimp just offshore. They worked relentlessly under the harsh July sun, plowing back and forth like farmers of the sea. Later, I followed some boats to a fish house located two miles upstream. Dockside, the coal was in full swing. A load of shrimp had come in and everybody wanted to be a part of the action. They wanted to know how many pounds have been caught, who did what, who beat who.
- Now, we're on it though.
- [Matthew] In 1999, I began filming this Sneads Ferry, trying to capture that sense of community and the fishing life upon which it is built. I found a place where people really do look out for one another, especially when the chips are down. I found fishermen who could read the wind, overhaul engines, handle just about anything mechanical. They knew where to search for their prey in a huge and dangerous ocean. They were hunters, they were artisans, to them, fishing was a calling, it was in the blood. Now it's 2006, the filming is done and the story has changed. A lot has happened over the last six years, most of it bad for the fishers of Sneads Ferry. The community has been hit hard, it's been really tough for the fishing families. Lots of boats are for sale. This is the story of one little fishing community and its struggles to keep afloat.
- Sneads Ferry is like a larger number of small villages in coastal North Carolina and further down into Georgia and Florida as well, which were traditionally clustered and built around fishing. Originally we had some whaling and things of that sort, but mostly fishing.
- And there was mostly a fishing, oystering, clamming, shrimping community with, oh, five or six families that lived right down in this triangle, and we knew everyone from Fulchers Landing, up to what is now Surf City, there were no bridges over to the beach at all, you had to go to the beach by water. Those who migrated to this part of the county bought land here, farmed and fished over on the beach and buried their dead here. My mother was a Grant and this is her family cemetery, the entire family has been in Onslow County for 12 generations since 1691.
- This area you know, up until the 1920s, this area, the whole coast of North Carolina was pretty isolated. And so we had this really interesting cultural history to develop in this area, based on water.
- I remember there was only like little, a couple little stores here you know when I was a kid, right across the road is one of them that used to be a Mr. Levy's old store, Levy Midgett. Most of the old settlers in Sneads Ferry we're kin to, sure are in one way or another.
- It was much smaller than it is now, my father had a farm, and the Marine Core base was not here then so he would farm like during the spring and summer months and the winter months, he would fish from the river.
- That is the livelihood of a lot of the families on Sneads Ferry, I mean, that goes back generations that that's how they have fed and clothed their families, from the river.
- In the small skiff, there's mama and daddy fishing and over here with a truck in front of it is Mama, which is known as a Shrimp Lady. She sat across the high-rise bridge at Surf City. All of this far back you go was all commercial fishermen. Grandpa he was 76 when he died, but that's all he ever did. And my uncles and great uncles, all them were, everybody was, well, the whole Millis family was commercial fishermen. We've lived in Sneads Ferry all our lives all of us.
- Let us pray. Father, we do thank You today for the bountiful harvest, Lord, that You have afforded for us over the past years. We thank You for the inheritance, Lord, that we have as being fishermen. Lord, not only fishermen of the sea, but fishers of men. Let us be aware that we are a part of the environment, Lord, that we'll preserve that which You have given us, bless this time of Blessing of the Fleet for us, in Your name we do pray, Amen.
- My grandparents were fishermen, my mother and my father were fishermen, and I've been doing it since I was preschool with my father. We have a season on shrimping and we have a season on oystering but we don't have a season because when we can't oyster, we shrimp, when we can't shrimp, we clam, hard job, seven days a week, 365 days a year, weather permit. Everybody works together and everybody helps each other. And when we're working, there's no captain and no crew, it's myself and whoever's working with me.
- I take care of the deck, I do all the culling, make sure everything's straight, keep everything going right, make it work as easy as possible or that's what I try to do. You can't think of everything all the time, but you just gotta stay alert and pay attention to your job.
- Yes, I love just like the first love you... the first girl you meet when you're a teenager. You fall in love with shrimping and there's nothing else. I can't imagine ever doing anything else. Well, I think I've got the greatest family in the world, I met my wife when I was 15 years old, when I was 18, we got married, we've been married 35 years. We have two beautiful daughters and three grandchildren. We all love each other, there's nothing one of us wouldn't do for the other. So I don't think you could ask for any better than that. Meg, what do you want to drink? juice or Sunny juice?
- They don't exactly have what other children have as far as the expensive clothes, expensive shoes, the cars, we manage to clothe them decently and they went to school regularly and they had their lunches at school with their friends and it seemed as though they just knew that we were doing the best we could do with the resources that we had to fall back on, and there was no complaining. They just, whatever mom and dad do, that's cool. Well, in years past you didn't see girls on the boats with their fathers, they were more or less home with mom and dads took their sons, but we only had girls so it worked out that the girls had been going with fathers.
- When I need a crew, I'll call one of my daughters on the phone, she's up at three o'clock in the morning and ready to go. They were raised on the boat from the time they were in diapers, they do the whole thing.
- When Christine was two weeks old, she was on the boat with her father shrimping off the beach here all day long because I was sick and we didn't have family to turn to. Oh... The other day we dropped a bucket overboard and we were trying to catch it and one of the porpoises come right up beside the bucket was watching us fetch it, it was cute
- My grandpa's been a fisherman for years and he has to test places before he actually puts the real nets overboard, but everywhere still has rocks and stuff you could tear your net up on.
- Yeah, he's my oldest grandson, I think he loves it more than I ever did. He's 10 years old, there's very little he don't know about and his curiosity is just amazing and anything he don't know about, he'll find it in a book, if it's not in a book, he'll find somebody that'll answer the question for him and he's not scared of work.
- He lets me drive the boat back to shore, lets me pull in the whip line and the lazy line, he lets me pull in the trynet sometimes.
- We sell commercial fishing supplies, but we make the fish traps and the crab traps.
- About six days a week of what we use to work most of the time.
- My father was a crabber and he decided that he wanted to do his own traps. So he designed his own little trap that wouldn't roll with the currents. So he started making them and then of course some of the other fishermen liked his so they wanted some, so he'd make them for them. So he decided that he'd teach us.
- Me and my wife worked for everything we've got. I had nobody to die and and leave me any money, I worked for it, manpower and...
- Still working for it.
- That's right, that's what God's word says, get the living by the sweat of your brow. That's what it says, that's in the Bible.
- Our business is the same as commercial fishermen in a lot of ways, because if they're not catching then we're not selling, so our business is largely dependent on what they're catching.
- You make a sandwich out of that, man, you've got something good to eat.
- Lemme tell you just...
- Okay, you've got, you got something good to eat, if you can do that.
- Oh yeah.
- Well, I usually go to fish house every evening to take out bait, you gotta use bait to put in the traps to attract the crabs. I usually do that every evening and put the gas in the boat and the baskets, I'll get up most of the time around five o'clock in the morning and just go work traps all day. My grandfather was a fisherman and my father was, and it's just been passed on from generation to generation. I started fishing when I was about 10 years old, when I got to about 14 I started crabbing and that's what I do mostly now. If you work at anything for 20 years, you're gonna know a little bit about it. I'm not saying I know it all 'cause I don't, but I know I'm pretty good for the area I work in and everything, I know how they move and for what weather and stuff like that.
- He hooks up the bait on it again and he puts baits in the pots, throws it back over and goes through the next one and it's the same thing, and he keeps doing it all day, not all day, but for a long time.
- It was real nice to grow up in Sneads Ferry, it still is, it's just a nice small community.
- It was nice, you knew everybody, it was small. Kayla, she's nine...
- Hello.
- She don't like messing with the river too much. Andrew, he's eight and he loves it.
- I pretend the wagon's a boat and I go out throwing buoys.
- I love all of them, and Andrew, he's my middle boy and he's the one that's always interested in crab pops and he loves to go fishing with me all the time and Zachary, he's kind of, you can't keep him still long enough to do nothing, he's wide open all the time. My wife Kim, I've known her my whole life. We grew up together and went to school together and we weren't that close, but somehow we just got together 10, 11 years ago, got married and had three children, best of times. I love my family and I wouldn't take nothing for it.
- somewhere...
- I mean, I never will have no money, but I'm rich, I'm the richest person in the world because I've got just what I wanted, I've got a family and that's what it's all about to me. It gets in your blood and you just can't get rid of it, it's just enjoyable work. You get to be your own boss, and you get to do like you want to really. Timing's everything, you know, just knowing when to put them, where to put them at a certain time, and that's the key to everything, that's the key to shrimping or crabbing or fishing with nets, anything, most time it's just knowing when the season is and knowing when things are gonna move and just knowing the right places to put everything at the right time. No, but I'm just saying. I like to know that I, you know, that I provide a service, you know, feeding people, at least you know you're doing something anyway. You know, people eats the product and you sell a good product and people gets to enjoy it, you know, that's a good feeling.
- When I got into the ministry, I wasn't planning on pastoring a church, I was just going to fill in for the pastor, maybe preach at another church on occasion, but you never know. I don't think the church ever expected me to be a pastor either, but it's really worked out good. I've made my mind up two or three times to quit and I just... Yesterday and he was telling me about... I just don't quit. The night before, he said, "I've had a rough day." He said, "I went out partying last night." He said, "I've been a bad boy," and I caught him right then, I said, "Jesus loves bad boys." I remember one experience I probably won't ever forget, I was running a boat up north for some other people and we were working 24 hours a day and I was steering that night, so of course put it on automatic pilot and I just stepped out on the bow of the boat and took that time for my prayer time and it just seemed like I was just taken right away, it seemed like the presence of the Lord was just right there. We've been to Florida together and worked down there, South Carolina, worked down there, we fished up north together.
- It's family really, I mean, it's a big fishing family, that's the only way I can say it.
- We've had a lot of fun together fishing. We get along good and especially Richard, Richard's worked with me since he was just a kid.
- Only family I've got is just my brothers and my mom and then my sister. I just never stopped long enough to get married.
- It is my home, I'd rather live on the boat than I had any other place, it's peaceful. I don't have nobody bothering me, a boat's like, this boat's just like my brother or my mom or something like that. If something happens to this boat, it's a part of my life, that's just the way it is. I know 'cause when we'd seen that boat sunk down there two years ago, tears come down my cheeks.
- I got it that morning, my wife was pregnant with Evelyn, our first baby, and I had a flat tire on my car, I jacked the car up and that old bumper jack, as most of them would do, stripped out, by the time I got the tire off the car, it stripped out, the car almost fell on me and I had a pretty good temper, 23 years old, 24 years old, and we were living close to the water, I threw the jack out in the water, told Dorothy, I said, I'm never going to do nothing else but fish, if I starve to death.
- Fishing, it's a hard life. One week you might make good, next week you don't or it could be a month, you know, but so far we haven't lost anything so all in all, it's good, I can't imagine him doing anything else.
- [Broadcaster] This is National Weather Service Radio Station, KEC-84, transmitting on the frequency of 162.400 megahertz from the National Weather Service Office in Newport, North Carolina. Additional observations from across the area...
- Like I say, it's just in the blood. I didn't, I didn't know it at the time, but it was there and no escaping it.
- It's weird being on the spotlight.
- [Matthew] You'll get used to it, don't worry.
- I don't know what we're gonna do about them reels, I might just use two electro mates and I'll use a Miami or something.
- I never ventured out in the ocean much, just sinking it along the beach or maybe shrimping along the beach, that's all I used to do, in the last 15 years, I guess, I started with the way offshore, it's a right good haul, making 10 knots, it'll take you five hours. It's pretty tough to get a good crew and keep them, Chops, he learned pretty quick. We've got some sharp teeth. And we fished this whole spring, we've fished right around each other off air, Yeah, I guess I learned a little bit.
- There's a lot of people around here that have been fishing their whole lives that are 60, 70, 80 years old, I've been fishing my whole life but I ain't... but 20, you know, there's a lot more to learn. That's a big part of why I'm working with John on the boat, he's been, he's kinda helping me out, teaching me about how to fish out there in that deep water.
- In the summertime, fishing with my dad and didn't have no school, I guess that's the first time I remember going, at about seven, eight years old and that hooked me. I've been doing it ever since. My wife's family, she's from Florida, she was born in Key West, raised in Marathon and she had like 14 brothers and sisters. So I've got a lot of family.
- I've worked in most of the fish houses, several of them here and I've had different jobs. Mostly packing or heading shrimp, weighing, we're talking 50 to 75 pounds each box, pretty much that's how I met my husband. I was working for Tom Elverson at a scallop House. So I met John, he was bringing in producing quite a bit, and sort of caught my eye. So we started dating and when he did, what really caught me was him taking me in the river and showing me what it was about. Once you go out there, you're in love. If you really love what's around you, you just grow to it. I have a daughter, 21 and I have a son, 17 and they've been going in the river ever since they were small. They were taught to swim at an early age before one.
- I think some of my earliest memories are of being on the boat and pretty much helping them do whatever they were doing.
- Robert, he just turned 17, he thinks he wants to fish for a living, he thinks he does, but I'm not sure. I was trying to... I hate to say it, but I was trying to talk him out of it.
- I think you gamble, money's good most of the time, you work, you get paid, you've got your down time when you can't make it out or you've got to fix something, it's just the freedom.
- It's a big, big ocean, I just sort of I go off as far as I want to go up to the northeast and then I'll work like off out, in and out, just sort of in and out trying to find where they're biting at. It's hard to keep up with.
- Fish are funny and nobody will ever be able to figure them out, you know what I mean? Different things in the climate and the moon and the tide and everything like that makes them behave certain ways and go to certain spots and eat different kinds, sometimes, some days there'll be so many fish in the water, you'll see them swimming all around the boat, you'll see kings everywhere cutting the water but they just won't eat. The first time I ever went out fishing with my parents, I was a month old 'cause they were both fresh outta Marine Core, neither one of them had jobs, I mean, fishing was all they did and they couldn't afford daycare for me, so they'd just bring me out on the boat. I learned how to walk on a shrimp boat.
- I guess, the fruits you're fed when you are young are the fruits you'll eat when you're old and those were the fruits he was fed so he's decided to do it. It takes a special kinda person to do it, you have to be able to get up off your rear end without being told and all that, you gotta have some self-drive in you.
- When you go commercial fishing, you have to catch, you have to catch a load of fish, you can't just go out there and catch four or five fish, you gotta go out there when they're knotted up and you can catch 10 or you need to catch like 1,000, between 500 and 1,000 pounds a day anyway.
- Water spouts out there are pretty common, but you stay away from them except at night when you can't see them. That's what got that boat a year before last, he was laying to do anchoring and it come up, severe thunderstorm and it you know, it pushed on out to sea and water spouts got him and sunk it right there, right to the anchor.
- If you go to sea enough, you'll get caught in some rough weather. I mean, even if you pick the pretty times to go, the good times to go, it may get rough before you get back.
- My grandfather, he died on the water and my wife's father, he died on the water too. And there's been several others that I don't know you know, their names, but there's been quite a few.
- The ocean can change in minutes, I mean, it can go from dead calm to 30-knot winds in just a few minutes, I've seen it do it.
- Well, you don't think of the danger, I mean, if it happens, it happens. You can be as safe as possible, but if you're not willing to take any chances, you're not gonna make a living in this business. We do our best shrimping when it's too bad to be there.
- We was anchored there one night trying to sleep a little bit, it wasn't you know it wasn't rough, it was right pretty actually, and off there where we fish at is the shipping lane. And I mean, you work right in the shipping lane and I just happened to wake up one time and I looked around and looked behind us and there he was, both his range lights lined right up on us steaming and you could hit him with a rock and he wasn't turning off. I guess whoever it was was asleep. It was all I could do to get her started up and outta the way.
- Oh yes, I've had two boats sink out from under me. I had one sink 20 miles off shore and not another boat in sight and it blowed 70 miles an hour and it sounded like an explosion. I jumped up and jumped in the engine room and come in chest deep of water. We were in total dark in the middle of the storm. Even though you're scared I couldn't even talk, I still had to keep enough senses to keep the boat afloat. So I'd have to dive down and go into the engine room, we had it built up high and get that, spray the lighter fluid on air cool motor to dry the spark plugging the water off, I'd crank it up and get the pump going and then I'd have to come back outta the hole. You couldn't wear a life jacket because there's no way you could go under the bulkhead. It was the scariest moment of my life but we were fortunate, we run the boat but then completely submerged underwater for four hours till we could run it on an island, and me and the crew survived, but the boat didn't.
- [Fred Troshire] As family members grow frustrated, the search for 36-year-old Luther Carol Norris continues. Norris is one of two fishermen reported missing Monday afternoon. Search crews believe Norris could have made it to shore near Verona Loop. The body of Joey Green, the other missing fisherman, was found late Monday evening.
- They went out in that rough weather because they were trying to make Christmas money for their children.
- [Fred Troshire] In Onslow County, Fred Troshire for TV 12, the news leader.
- Me and my little brother, we had been up the river oystering, we'd oyster it all day long. We was coming back down, we got right there at the bridge and Joey's daddy and Donnie Millis was in my uncle's boat and they'd come to us and asked us, had we seen him.
- I couldn't sleep, I had a weary, restless feeling. So I got up the next morning and every morning at eight o'clock, Hotdog would call me and his dad before he'd go out in the water, go to work, well, he didn't call that morning.
- And my little cousin stopped us on the road and he told us that they had just found Joey floating, that he was dead. So I think that's when it started on me then, it's when it got tough. And the three days of being up there with my friends and family searching for him, for my brother, it was hard, it was real hard.
- And about five o'clock I started my dinner, and my husband came in, he said, "Honey, they found Joey Green's body floating up the river. And just as soon as they told me they'd found Joey Green's body up the river, I knew that Hotdog was with him." That told me right there what my restless spirit was. And it's sorta like I've been in a dream or something and I know it's real, but it's like it's not real.
- Tommy Gray, Atlantic, Don Willis, Atlantic, Fred Cannon, Mill Creek, Henry Hamilton, Harkers Island, Short Bob, Atlantic, Vernon Daniels, Atlantic, Luther Norris Jr., Sneads Ferry and Joseph Green Second, Sneads Ferry.
- I've earned it because I love God and because He's done a special work, I want to love Him.
- It's like with one big family, everybody knows everybody, you can go to the store, you can go to the cafe and you'll run into somebody you know.
- We kind of help each other out, look out for each other, of course, if anybody's in trouble, we'll get anybody, it doesn't matter.
- It's like a big neighborhood. Everybody knows everybody and then nobody's throwing rocks at nobody.
- When somebody is sick, we go, or if somebody passes away, we try to go you know, and comfort the family.
- I think everybody fairs the same. You don't have this man that has a lot more than the other, everybody flourishes at the same time and everybody does without at the same time.
- Everybody's related to everybody and they all make you feel good. It's like your work is nothing, you could work 15 hours straight and you're tired after you get home.
- There's a lot of boats out there and you know everybody talks to everybody and they'll all fan out wherever they're biting at, you know, you call a guy and say, "Hey, they're biting out there?" Then you go to that area, you know, pretty much like that. I mean, they all work together, it's pretty neat.
- All right, I'm gonna let him go right here. We're going back and forth, back and forth, it has pros and cons. She told me, she said, "Just go and do what you want." I swear to not to do it Unintelligible
- We help anybody that needs help. You know, if they've been fisherman before and they need some help...
- Military does that...
- A little money, we usually try to help them out.
- No, I know you can see the houses.
- They know law around here and they're right. I thought the whole thing was supposed to be closed, that middle strip, and then Joy, the way Joy stuck it off, that whole middle strip was going to be closed and then when it got some clams, closed right onto to the hill.
- Going to the hill and...
- But they didn't do it that way, Rich and oh, we're gonna open up that piece of guard down, we're gonna let them have that. We kinda try to keep the community involved with what's going on and what's coming next, You know, what kind of laws we're trying to put on... And what he did before, I'll tell you that.
- You know what, it looks great.
- A lot of my childhood was in a, down in the Keys because we moved back and forth a lot when I was younger, I guess we moved back and forth three or four times, it was just dependent on where my dad was doing the best at for a year or so.
- And I to work, mechanic work and tried to drive trucks, anything come along, I've done a little bit of it, but I always turned around and come back to the ocean like an old sea turtle.
- Everybody's just, you know, seems like family. Like I heard some of the girls talking about, you know, you go to the Food Lion and you're gonna run out there a few minutes, pick up a few things, you run into three or four people and you got to talk, so sometimes you go to the Food Lion, you're gone an hour, two hours.
- We all know each other and we are all like, we get involved with each other.
- $1?
- $1 a piece...
- My family moved here the first day of 1949 and I had already graduated from school, started to work at the Riverview, I've worked there and got to know so many people, I've watched them, I've fed them in the high chairs, they've grown up, got married, bring their children in, I've waited on them, that's been just the last 38 years that I was there. We could go back three generations or more from the time I started, I've really enjoyed all my years at the Riverview. There part of my life really.
- [Matthew] Despite its close-knit insular quality, the community of Sneads Ferry is inextricably bound to the world, it's very survival depends on it. The name of the game is moving the product.
- 34 count again, that's different.
- The big one.
- Keep out on Sundays and Wednesdays, go to New York Market and Baltimore Market and then I run a route every week around Wilmington to Wrightsville Beach, Carolina Beach and we sell those locally.
- We got to....
- Can't hold it on the tail, hog snap. You catch it, John?
- Yep, upside down.
- A fish house is just a... he's just a dealer that all the seafood goes through, that's his job. He owns a fish dealership, we catch the product and we sell it to him and then he's got distributors or people that comes and buys it from him and then he sells to the public also. The crabs I caught today will be in Maryland tomorrow. A guy will come, pick them up with a truck and he'll haul them back at night and then they'll be over on the market or they're all end up in New York, sometimes they send them over to New York over to the Fulton Fish Market. So they don't, they don't set still very long.
- It's a whole different ballgame, .
- I have no idea.
- Right up there.
- Because of the regulation by the United States government and the world in regard to the size of the fish you can catch, we have a lot of imported fish now.
- They can import shrimp cheaper than we can actually catch it. Everything now is leaning more to imports. Over half the seafood food in this country is imported in from other countries.
- The demand for fish has increased, in fact in the United States in the past 10 years, we've increased the per capita consumption of fish, so we're putting pressure everywhere else in the world as well to meet these demands.
- So what are they working for? 50 cent a day? I mean, you can afford to air freight it back if you ain't paying nobody nothing to catch it and clean it and all that stuff, so yeah, they can come out on that deal.
- You know what is affecting the small fishermen is imports, you know, from aquaculture. I mean, you look at if you think of shrimp, shrimp is the main thing aquacultured around the world. Now we still like our local shrimp but these guys feel like imports are killing them.
- But they were sending a lot of shrimp in this country, farm shrimp, cheap and in China, annual income is like $500 and we can't compete with that and it's just got us in a mess. The price of shrimp is cheaper now than it's been in over 10 years and here we are catching natural shrimp and everybody's in debt. You done borrowed money to work on these boats and fed the economy, now whether the economy feeds us back or not, we'll see, it's gonna be tough.
- My wife has a retail market, she retails shrimp. We've had people come by and didn't even know what they were looking at because they've never seen a fresh shrimp, never seen one with the head on. That's right here in this country, you would think everybody knew what a fresh shrimp was, but they get the Argentina shrimp that I wouldn't eat.
- Thank you, have a good day.
- Not if I had a choice.
- We're putting ourself outta business, that's what we're doing by importing so much. Everybody wants fair trade, but we don't want'em dumped in here at such a cheap price that we can't compete. They filed a petition to tax the imported shrimp and it is a tariff that's placed on six countries that we filed against, which was India, China, Thailand, Brazil, Vietnam and Ecuador. The government found that they were dumping shrimp in here in the United States. Their labor is over there so cheap, of course they can produce them cheaper than we can catch them, but they were selling them way below their cost and they used a lot of chemicals and one is the Chloramphenicol, which is banned in the United States. We just have to lobby for more money for the USDA also for more testing, because it always comes back to money. It's always, they don't have the manpower, they don't have the money, they test like so many shipments but they just don't test enough.
- Sometimes it seems like the federal government just lets you down. They're letting imports pour in this country and ruin the price, it ain't nothing but just big business, is all it is, but it kinda has an effect on working people in this country, a big impact on them.
- You hadn't ought be a smart man to figure out that if you cut your food sources, how hard is it gonna be to put a country on its knees?
- You catch at least $1,000 a day, out of that $1,000, it's gonna cost me $100 for fuel plus nets wear and tear on the equipment and stuff, so take $200, that leaves $800. The boat gets $400, the crew splits the other 400, that's three of us splitting $400. Then we gotta pay taxes out of that, we ain't got much left. We clear $400 a week we're doing good and some days are better. Some days we ain't got that much.
- They earn every penny that they make and then some 'cause it's a hard life. I think it makes you old before your time.
- You worry a lot, when the weather gets bad here, you wonder how it is out there, you really don't never know if they go out, if they're gonna come back in or not and you worry about if they're gonna catch anything 'cause there's good times and there's bad times, I've seen some lean times as far as financial.
- Well, I'll have two months that I'll put in 16, 18-hour days for two months and it is just not that much money, not at our level. You could get a decent job on the hill and make more than we do with a lot less stress. But we would be just like penning an animal up.
- You take an old boat and you stay with it. You get to listen to all the little creeks and things what it makes and the little rackets it makes and it kinda gets like a part of you and then you weather a lot of bad weather with it and it brings you through it. You learn to have a lot of respect for it.
- When I was first running boats, I only had a compass and radio, I ain't had no antenna to tell me what course to run, how long it'd take me to get there like I do now. They used to just run by a compass, set me a course and figure my time, of course I got pretty good at it, I guess, and I never get lost, I always come back. It's not just a piece of wood floating it, it's a special attachment there. I know that the other boat I had, the Cape Romaine, I came home and told my wife I was gonna sell it, she didn't talk to me for three days, it upset her so bad, it became a part of us.
- Some things you do pick up yourself, like I picked up making nets. We get out in Morehead to get a net built. I watched the fella, he cut nets and one man that was the maintenance, he cut nets just as hard as he could cut. I told my buddy one day, I said, "I think I could fix that net." And so I come back one day and I whacked around and made me a net, it worked. And so that's how I got into it.
- It's a fever I guess you get, but I've always worked on boats. I don't know why I like to do it, it's something I like to do and we'll buy an old hull just like that one and tear it down and rebuild it. We'll build everything, rigging and all. It used to be an old head bug, I've been working on it for probably three winters off and on, it might be four winters, I didn't get no hurry and we don't draw nothing up. People builds boats, you know, they don't draw nothing up, they just got, they just know what they want to do with it. It's a lot of work in something like that, I mean, you can work, work, work and see nothing you do, then directly you see a little something you've done.
- We had an old fisherman that was our teacher, in other words, anything we'd asked him, he had an answer. He was, you knew he was good, we asked him one time said we wanted to go floundering and we had small boats to go floundering. We said, which way is the wind gonna blow from, and he'd look up and all the way around, and then he'd say, "It's coming outta southwest" or "It's gonna blow outta northeast," and he didn't ever miss it. So I said, "Mr. Chin," I said, "Why do you always look up when I asked you where's the wind gonna come from?" He said, "Well, you know the Bible says you can't see the wind." I said, "Yeah." He said, "But you look around and wherever stars is twinkling the most, that's the wind between you and the stars." He said, "That's the way the wind's gonna come from. If you look southwest and the stars is twinkling real bright and they're calm all the way around," then he said, "It's coming outta Southwest." And that's how we learned how to tell about the wind, where it was gonna come from at night when we was going floundering. We'd ask them things and he would tell us. So that's basically where we got most of our information, was that old gentleman.
- How're you doing, sir? , have a good day.
- You too.
- Most of our charges are misdemeanors, there are some charges that are felonies, taking shellfish from a polluted area, second offense, that's a felony, you can actually do jail time over that so that's a very, very serious charge as far as the fisheries are concerned. Hey buddy.
- What's going on?
- Do you have your license handy? Do that, please.
- It's right there.
- Okay, all right. Just a little advice, you're supposed to carry your license on...
- Well, they're regulating a lot of us out. There are several kind of fishings I've done all through my life that I'm not even allowed to do anymore because now you have to make a certain amount of money at certain fisheries or do it so many years in a row in order to hold a license. So it's flounder fishing for summer flounder, I'm not allowed to do that because I went six or eight years I didn't do it. I'm not allowed to catch black bass because I didn't catch a certain quota, at the time they had a quota system on.
- They go by landings, annual landings and some years aren't as good as others, and I guess they think, well, that stock is depleted so we have to do something about it, so they close it or put a limit on it, but they really don't know what's out there, it's a big ocean.
- Fish stocks are down, how do you know the fish stocks are down? All you know is what's been caught. What if we had some bad weather this time when the fish ran by this year and the weather was pretty last year, we got to catch a pile of fish because the weather was pretty, this year you had a big old bad weather scene, fish went offshore or went by. Yep, but the fish stocks are down but that don't mean the fish weren't there, you just didn't get to catch them. Nobody looks at that part of it.
- A lot of times you have a lot of bad weather up here, and a lot of the boys' wooden boats are getting old just like mine, and they say, you've got X number of days you can fish this week, then they're pushing you. You shouldn't have X number of days you can work, if you've got an old boat, it should be when the weather gets pretty and if you can make it, make it, don't push yourself and put your life in danger. See, we had an old boat up here in Morehead, that I think they lost four men off of sunk the boat lost it on a down of bad weather, them boys trying to feed their families and the days had them shut down where they had to go or miss it. When you've got bills pushing you and it's time to put some groceries on the table, you're going.
- They're doing more damage by regulating because if you can't make a living doing one thing, you'll go to something else. When that drops off, you'll go to another fishery. But they're putting you now where you've got to stick to one fishery regardless whether you make any money or not, so it's a lot harder impact on that individual fishery. If you were allowed to move on to another, well, this would have a chance to come back.
- Of course we need regulations, I mean, nobody would disagree with that, the question is how many regulations and what kind and how far do you go? And there's no answer to that either. The problem is that we don't really know how much regulation we need and so we keep searching and keep trying to come up with ways to manage this system so that we can maximize its output.
- And the issue paper I get into what we've seen...
- I mean, right now I would agree with the fishermen, there are too many regulations. I'm on the Marine Fisheries Commission and I have no idea how many regulations we're trying to enforce. And so, I mean, this is a problem.
- I used to go to some of the meetings with my father. I remember being a kid and being at the meetings and all the commercial fishermen are just in regular seats in the back. So it's almost like there's a clear division to begin with, I was very young and after we sat there and everything, I remember telling my dad afterwards that it was like they were talking down to us.
- You won't be able to jump from fishery to fishery and they're closing this fishery and closing that fishery and they'll just tighten it down so tight until there won't be much left to do, so who would wanna be a fisherman? If you can't work and do like you want to, why would you want to be one? And that's what ended up happening to the industry.
- I probably have spent half my life at sea, I kind of compare the ocean to life. One day it can be everything, calm and good, and then the next day everything's upside down, almost turned over, it get rough, bad.
- There's a very deep value of having commercial fishermen on the water. They have an incredible depth of knowledge about the relationships between oxygen levels and fish populations and pollution and runoff, they're not by any stretch of the imagine in here just to empty our waters of fish and then just go move away, they're in it for the long haul.
- Some people have got the understanding we're just out there killing everything, destroying everything but we're not doing it. If we kinda look after it, it'll be fishing as long as we're here. And I think it's just a misunderstanding mostly, there's a lot of bad propaganda I think, going out about it.
- Whenever anything happens in the ocean to any particular species it affects everything else 'cause everything in the ocean eats something underneath it. When something even when like when shrimp's low, shrimp feed a lot of fish and when there's not a whole lot of shrimp, the fish aren't gonna run onshore, they're gonna go offshore where they would eat a lot other crustaceans, little crabs and things like that.
- My old major professor told me that if you want to understand ecology, you gotta figure out what critters are going to eat. He says, "All critters eat and if you can figure out how much and when, then you've got most of the ecology down" and he's absolutely correct, everything's going to eat. So what eats what is an interesting question and when do they do it?
- They monitor the resource. If you take these guys off the water, which slowly seems to be happening, there is going... we're gonna lose a huge base of knowledge about the resource. They're in it for the long haul, they want this to be a resource that perpetuates itself.
- [Matthew] The last thing they want is to fish out the sea. What they know how to do is to catch seafood in ways that are limited by scale and by locality to being sustainable. These fishermen know the old ways, they are stewards of the sea rather than dominators. Comparing small scale fishermen to the industrial freezer trawler operations, is like measuring a family farm against an agribusiness company with hundreds of thousands of acres. At least farmers usually own their land, no one owns the ocean.
- We're not a bunch of gangsters out to rape the earth, we're trying to make a living and preserve what we can 'cause if we don't preserve something today, we know we won't have anything tomorrow.
- Well, it's gonna change, but there'll still be some commercial fishing activity there and there'll still be a small community of those folks. I mean, those families aren't gonna just pick up and leave tomorrow, but the majority of people in Sneads Ferry are not gonna be related to the fishery and they're gonna start making rules down there that may or may not include the tradition. And so the town is going to change, the economy's going to change, it's changing already.
- What I'm doing now is we opened up Outriggers Marine, it's a marine supply a business and it's both for commercial and recreational fishermen. Knowing how hard it is to make a living fishing, I figured then one of the next best things I can do to be in the fishing community a little bit, is to be there to provide the services to fishermen. It really looks like they're trying to stop us, it's not just regulation, it's like... I don't know what you would want to call it, it's just like they're trying to put us out of business.
- Only trawlers you'll have in another 25 years will be big company-owned trawlers. The little individual people like we are, will be phased out.
- Commercial fishing industry's probably been cut a third what it was. You've got some old diehards that are gonna stay right here and grind, you know what I'm saying? They ain't gonna let everything beat them, they're right there getting it right on.
- Well, all of us pretty young ladies out here, we are running for Miss Shrimp Queen and Alexis Midland is the old Shrimp Queen, and we're all going in there taking interviews about 10 minutes, they ask us questions about what we like, what we wanna do or things like that...
- I love Sneads Ferry with all my heart, I've lived here since I was born, I've been to every Shrimp Festival since I was born in 1983.
- And my family is a history of shrimpers, my dad is a commercial fisherman, my grandpa, all my uncles.
- My mother was Shrimp Queen 20 years ago and ever since I was five I've been running around with that crown on my head, so I wanna follow in her footsteps.
- Oh, I'd love to be Miss Shrimp. Miss Shrimp is a title that any girl in the world would love to hold because you want someone to look up to you, you want to be a good queen to have Ms. Junior Miss look up and say, "You know, that's the good person I wanna be. I wanna be queen like her because I want to hold... I want to hold a good reputation to be a good person like her."
- And your new 2000 Ms. Shrimp Festival, is...
- Oh, this feels great.
- This is definitely...
- It's an honor, this is amazing.
- Well, I know we don't have that...
- I'll be glad.
- Me too.
- When the net's free, jumping all you want to.
- Now come on, we've got one more.
- [Matthew] It all became so clear at the Shrimp Festival. I went to my first one in the year 2000, spirits were high and the town was going strong, but this time, it was different. The 35th Annual Shrimp Festival, how ironic to have a Shrimp Festival when half of the fish houses are for sale and the fishermen have gone through one of the worst seasons on record? What an empty celebration it seems to be of a life that once was? So proud of life, these fishers, gnarl, tough hands, powerful muscles, eyes glinted with wisdom as old as the waves, will it all be gone?
- We would like for it to stay the same, but it's not gonna be a little sleepy fishing village of Sneads Ferry.
- Well, over the past two years, growth has been incredible and interest rates have been low and billing has boomed, but we've just come out, the county has just come out with a new property evaluation and average increase was 378%, my cousin over here on Mill Creek, his house went up, house and lot went up 620% and his cousin next door, their property went up 2,000%, which is the greatest increase that I'm aware of but property values are going up four to 20 times and the increased taxes will put a severe strain on people with fixed incomes or moderate incomes or working people to live in the community.
- The tax, huh, I don't know how long I'll be able to live in my house, I'll tell you, I wish they would have gone up on them before I retired, at least I would've felt more comfortable in knowing that I would have enough money to pay it.
- If things get to where I can't make a living fishing, I'm sure we'll move to the Winston-Salem area if I can't, if things get so bad with expenses and fish and rules and regulations, if it gets to where we can't make a living and afford to raise a family here, we'll definitely if when we move, if we have to move, we'll definitely go to the Winston-Salem area around her family.
- My major is elementary education, so I plan to be a teacher.
- Yes, I've met my lovely wife, Lisa, her parents had a vacation home down here and she had been coming down here to the Sneads Ferry area ever since she was very young and eventually got a job at the local fish house at Everett Seafood where I sell my fish and we met and we were friends for about three years, I guess, and one day decided to go out and then we got engaged and now we're married.
- And you've gotta find a thing.
- [Matthew] All right, I've got a serious question for you.
- What?
- [Matthew] Do you have a girlfriend?
- Nah, not yet.
- [Matthew] You said, "I wanna be a crabber when I grow up," do you still feel that way still? How are you feeling about it?
- I don't know what to tell you. Sometimes I wanna be one, but then again I look at it and see how it's going and I get out of position so I wanna go to college. People like my dad done it before his dad, after his dad, pass it on generation and generation, I think they'll do a little bit of it, but there's gonna be less and less people and I believe no more, the longer it goes, the less people's gonna get in it. I'm more than likely I probably will end up being one 'cause I love it and he's done it and I know all about it and stuff.
- I love fishing, I was born and raised to fish, it's all I've ever done, I don't know anything else, but I don't wanna do anything else. I mean, I just like being out here, look at it, it's just as pretty as it can be out here.
- From my perspective and even from tourists' perspective, you really don't wanna convert the coast to a place where it's just a bunch of condos and all the people, all they can do is be chambermaids and busboy and bartenders and waiters and stuff like that, I mean, those are not rich lifestyles like this.
- It's gonna become a tourist town just like Myrtle Beach, it's just gonna be like a resort. I gave him his own chance, I mean, he can do what he wants to do, but I guess he's gonna fish for a living.
- They started with the real estate and they're gonna push us outta here eventually 'cause there won't be no place to dock a boat, I mean, unless you own that land, then that's gonna be the end of it, you know.
- These villages are now turning into tourist areas where development is beginning to be the swinging force. People have discovered the unique coastal North Carolina and they're coming here by flocks and they don't understand this coastal culture much, they want to have things like they had it in Cleveland or Boston and so you change.
- They say the turtle comes in and lays his eggs with the beach over here, and the condos just pushed the beach hills down so the turtle don't have no place lay its eggs anymore to start with. Commercial fishermen didn't do that, developers did that, building condos.
- I've heard a lot of people talk about fishing boats was eyesores. They moved to the south to see the shrimp boats and the commercial fishing, now they have the beaches cluttered with condos and now our fishing boats have become eyesores and that's the people we're up against, the people that's got the money. They spend more on a luncheon than we make in a month.
- But that's the deal, you can't fight them, you survive and pay your bills, you eat, you might save a little bit, but you can't go fight a man that's got millions of dollars.
- Growth is something that's gonna happen so we have to accept it, but I'm just, I like the old ways better.
- There's people that's got money. It's like I said, I think some of them have got more money than they have brains. They go over there and build them condominiums on those, over there on that... right there on that beach, and the first hurricane comes a lot of times and wipes them out, the insurance company will pay it off and then they'll go back and build it right back again.
- They've tightened up on fishing regulations and fishing ain't as good as it used to be and imports has come in and it's just an accumulation of a bunch of different problems and I think it was manmade, some of it, it was done on purpose to try to get the land and that's what's happening now. They're fixing to buy up all the waterfront property and us people that fish for a living are just being pushed out, we're not even gonna have nowhere to sell the product or keep your boat or anything, and I don't think this stuff come along by accident, I think it was kind of done on purpose.
- The fish houses are there today and you want to keep them there if North Carolina wants to keep them there, North Carolina needs to pay for that, don't they? If it benefits the State of North Carolina, the people of Sneads Ferry, we need to purchase that and leave it as it is and say this is a historic part of North Carolina, we're gonna preserve it and we're gonna keep it, now where are we gonna get the money? Are the people of North Carolina willing to pay for that effort? I certainly would be, you know, I'm one of these people that believe you need to preserve heritage history and what our communities are.
- We go out there and we fish and we try to tell them when something's wrong and they don't listen. And it's kinda hard, it's really hard anymore. I would like for my son to see better days working with his father and learning to navigate, to come in through the inlet to fish, to just do what I did and I don't see it happening. My grandkids will never see it, not if something don't change.
- I've still got a lot to look forward to, enjoy the grandchildren.
- You just can't use up everything today with no thought for tomorrow, 'cause whether we wanna believe it or not, tomorrow is coming unless there are some changes and we go back to some of the old-fashioned ways, I just don't know what we're going to do. I guess our folks that's made all of these millions of dollars on condos and selling our land and selling the farms and the fish houses, well, we'll just have to sit back and count our money and buy all the little food from the other countries that'll let us have it. That's about the only thing I know.
- I think fishermen are dreamers to a point, you always dream of that big school of fish or that big catch of shrimp and if you can make enough to survive between the big schools, you've got something to dream for. But what would this country be today if you didn't have dreamers? I think most fishermen have to be to survive.
- Well, it's gonna continue for me until they plant me, they can do what they wanna do but I love my fish. Doing what I was born to do, put on this earth to catch fish and aggravating them mullets.
