Wanchese, North Carolina, wears its heart on its sleeve.
Located on the southern tip of Roanoke Island, where the Roanoke and the Croatan sounds spill into the Pamlico, the fishing port holds a fiery grip on the lashes binding it to the sea.
“We might go down, but we’ll go down swinging,” says fish dealer Billy Carl Tillett, sitting in his office at Moon Tillett Fish Company in Wanchese. The office sits high above the harbor, like the osprey nests over the marsh on the outskirts of town.
Billy Carl makes no bones that he’d rather be downstairs, packing fish, repairing nets or rebuilding an ice machine.
“There’s always a pallet jack or something torn up around here,” he says.
He’s handed many responsibilities over to his son Ryan, placing the trust in Ryan that his father placed in him when he stepped off the family’s trawlers to help at the fish house in 1989. His father, Moon, built the original part of the plant in 1974 to serve a regional cooperative. The cooperative folded within a few years, and Moon turned the building into Moon Tillett Fish Company in 1977.
The fish house sits at the tail end of Wanchese, home to some 1,500 residents. Crab pots, net sheds, boats, stands of webbing, engine repair shops and fish houses dominate the landscape. Roads are named after Tilletts, Daniels, Etheridges and the captains of other fishing families.
Archaeologists say the first fishing community at Wanchese dates back at least 1,500 years when the Roanokes, part of the native Carolina Algonkian culture, fished the sounds from a site called “Thicket Lump.”
In 1886, the first post office serving the cluster of fishermen’s homes in what was called “the lower end” on the island was established, and the village was named Wanchese after the last ruler of the Roanokes. The postmaster, Ezekiel R. Daniels, owned many of the fishing boats in the village and financed the purchase of others.
Willie R. Etheridge opened the first fish house in Wanchese in 1936. Etheridge’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren run two packing and processing plants, Etheridge Seafood Company and Wanchese Fish Company, in the village today.
Wanchese ranks 27th in commercial seafood landings at U.S. ports. In 2010, the port landed 25.6 million pounds of fish and shellfish, valued at $22 million.
Billy Carl says economic gales and regulatory storms have battered the village’s industry, but that the readiness of Wanchese fishermen to turn to new fisheries and new gear buffers the bruises.
He used his family’s business as an example.
“In 1983, the shrimping was as bad as it could get, and Louis Fass up in Hampton (Virginia) convinced us to try squidding,” he says.
“That first trip I worked off Ocracoke and had about 200 boxes. With squid bringing 15 cents a pound, I remember thinking this was no way to make good money, but the next trip I had 600 boxes, and each trip improved after that.”
“It ended up as good a summer as I’ve ever had,” he says.
Moon built the first freezer at the company after that summer, and now the Tilletts ship squid to seafood and bait markets worldwide.
Ten years later, the family added another freezer, planning to hitch their star to the Boston mackerel bait fishery.
“We flipped the switch on that system that January and never caught enough Boston mackerel to fill it up even one time, but we developed a good frozen croaker market, so the freezer wasn’t a loss by any measure,” Billy Carl says.
The history of Wanchese is replete with stories of fishermen turning to new ventures.
Captain Will Etheridge Jr. was the first to use a flynet in the state, one he bought from a fisherman in New Jersey around 1970.
“We were fishing near Captain Will and when Daddy saw how well it worked compared to traditional gear, he built the first one in North Carolina,” Billy Carl recalls.
“There’s lots of ingenuity here,” he adds.
Charles Midgett was one of those ingenious fishermen. He ran charter boats most of his career, but tried his hand at commercial fishing in the winter months.
A longtime Wanchese resident, Midgett grew up “over on the beach” at Nags Head, where his father owned a gas station.
When a 72-foot-long whale washed ashore at Pea Island in the early 1930s, Midgett’s father carted the backbone and skull to a spot in front of the station. It wasn’t long before the area, where a road lead west to Wanchese, became known as “Whalebone Junction.”
In 1986, Midgett was vacationing in Hawaii and saw fishing boats working Japanese green sticks. He returned to Wanchese, determined to perfect the gear for tuna fishing off the Outer Banks.
“We already knew that baits skipping across the water caught more tunas, but the Japanese birds started to cartwheel after a certain speed,” Midgett recalled in an interview a few years before his death.
“I knew that dolphin and tunas are compatible, so I shaped my birds like a dolphin,” he explained, “but the most important thing was adding a weight under the back fin.”
“Fishermen here have never been content to do things one way just because that’s the way it’s always been done,” Billy Carl says. “Now we’re looked down at for trying to improve, like we’re doing something wrong if we have a better rig than what was used in the ’40s.”
His family owns two 80-foot steel trawlers, the Linda Gayle and the Gallant Fox. Billy Carl’s brother Craig captains the Linda Gayle.
Moon bought the Alabama-built trawlers after he and his sons started running the Captain John Duke up to New Jersey to scallop in the early 1970s. The John Duke was a 65-foot wooden boat that Moon had bought in 1965.
“The weather up there in the summer isn’t as pretty as you might think. After one trip, Daddy looked at us and said, “You boys aren’t going to drown me doing this, so if you want to keep on, I’ll get another boat,” Billy Carl laughs.
The trawlers fish for squid and shrimp during the summer. In the winter, the boats bring in some flounder and sea bass, but primarily fish for croaker and bluefish.
The fish company also buys from independent trawlers, drop-netters, and crab potters.
Like the trawlers, the drop-netters target croaker and bluefish.
“The drop-netters have been shoved into the corner without a whole lot of choices, just like the rest of us,” Billy Carl explains, while local drop-netter Tommy Danchise winds croaker net onto the reel of his boat docked at the fish house.
“Everybody is wrestling with the loss of diversity caused by management plans,” Billy Carl continues. He says the best winters were those when some smaller boats long-lined for shark, others went after dogshark, and others worked on croaker, bluefish and trout.
“Now we’re all doing what everybody else does,” he says.
Billy Carl points to the effect of the Labrador Current hitting the Gulf Stream, and says no state experiences the extreme seasonal nature that characterize North Carolina fisheries.
That’s one reason catch-share programs don’t sit well with the fish dealer. Another is that he knows firsthand what it was like to be shut out of the scallop fishery because he didn’t have requisite landings in the right years.
Across the harbor from the fish company lies the Wanchese Seafood Industrial Park, built by the state in 1980.
Bob Peele, park director, explains that the state envisioned seafood businesses locating there because stabilization of Oregon Inlet, offering safe passage to the Atlantic, seemed certain at the time.
Congress had authorized two stone jetties to anchor the shifting inlet, but never funded the project, and the issue became a lightning rod for environmental organizations and government agencies objecting to the jetties.
Few seafood companies moved into the park, and in 1994, state legislators opened the client base to include marine trades. Yacht builders, marinas, boat manufacturers, and associated services moved into the park. With the exception of O’Neal’s Sea Harvest, few businesses in the park are tied directly to the seafood industry.
“I think my father’s biggest disappointment was that his diligent efforts to see Oregon Inlet stabilized weren’t successful. Every promise was broken,” Wanchese fish dealer Willie Etheridge III says.
“In 2003, we hit a real brick wall when the Bush administration said it wasn’t going to do anything about the jetties,” Peele explains. “We thought they promised more dredging, but the dredging budget isn’t where it needs to be.
“Here we are today, no better off than what we started with,” says Moon Tillett, who served as chairman of the county waterways commission for many years.
Passage through Oregon Inlet is so treacherous now that most larger boats steam north to Hampton, Virginia rather than risk a trip through “the ditch,” fishermen’s nickname for the inlet. And, captains of smaller commercial fishing boats and charter-boats acknowledge that acute navigational skills and nerves of steel are necessary on many days.
Still, broken promises haven’t busted Wanchese’s confidence in its stature as a fishing village. The town approved a complex zoning code that protects the nets sheds, crab shedders, fish houses and other hallmarks of the fishing industry there. Some 1,500 years after its beginning as a fishing village, Wanchese is determined to remain one.
Susan West is an author, journalist and advocate for fishermen who lives on Hatteras Island, North Carolina.